Learning to Live: Six Essays on Marcel Proust (Value Inquiry, 347) 9004422552, 9789004422551

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Learning to Live

Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Executive Editor Leonidas Donskis† Managing Editor J.D. Mininger

volume 347

Philosophy, Literature, and Politics Edited by J.D. Mininger (lcc International University)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/vibs and brill.com/plp

Learning to Live Six Essays on Marcel Proust By

Maurizio Ferraris

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Image used with permission: Fonds Marcel Proust. II — À LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU. A — Manuscrits autographes. XXXI–XCII Soixante-deux cahiers de brouillons comportant des ébauches des différentes parties de la Recherche à divers stades de leur rédaction. XXXVIII–XCII À la recherche du temps perdu. LXIX–LXXVIII Le Côté de Guermantes. LXIX–LXXI Le Côté de Guermantes I. NAF 16679. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ferraris, Maurizio, 1956- author. Title: Learning to live: six essays on Marcel Proust / by Maurizio Ferraris. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill Rodopi, [2020] | Series: Value inquiry book series : philosophy, literature, and politics, 0929–8436 ; vol 347 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020023181 (print) | LCCN 2020023182 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004422551 (hardback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004431232 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922. À la recherche du temps perdu. | Memory in literature. | Time in literature. | Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature. Classification: LCC PQ2631.R63 A78756 2020 (print) | LCC PQ2631.R63 (ebook) | DDC 843/.912--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023181 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023182

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0929-8436 ISBN 978-90-04-42255-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-43123-2 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Presentation to the First Edition  VII Note  IX The Sweet Cheat Gone  1 1 The Fugitive  2 2 Truth, Misunderstandings, Rumours  7 Notebooks and Novel  12 1 Unpublished Works  12 2 What the Cahiers can Teach Us  15 3 Names  17 4 Characters  21 5 Metamorphoses and Migrations  24 6 Fragments and Contexts  29 7 Affections  31 8 Bibliographical Note 33 Bal de têtes: bête, bêtise and Identity  35 1 The Guermantes Matinée  35 2 Personality and Seriality  38 3 The Group and the Band  41 4 Theory of Identity  47 5 Psychology, Sociology, Biology  51 Problems with Autobiography  59 1 The Autobiographical Pact  59 2 The Writing of Life  63 3 Structural Anthropology  69 4 Time Lost and Time Regained  72 The Master of the “madeleine” and the Master of the “esprit de Guermantes”  75 1 Problems with « Marcellism »  75 2 The Failure of Pure Narration  77 3 Secondary Rehabilitation of Intelligence  83

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Like Giants Immersed in Time: Ontology, Phenomenology, and Marcel Proust  90 1 It No Longer Exists but I can Perceive It  90 2 Ontology  92 3 Phenomenology and Epistemology  94 4 The Atemporal Self  97 5 In Search of Lost Time, or the Children’s Crusade  100 References  103 Index  105

Presentation to the First Edition In line with much contemporary philosophy, but with a more systematic thematization, hermeneutics has made it clear that philosophy is neither a mirror nor a conforming description of external reality. Rather—in accordance with the speculativism put forward by transcendental idealism—philosophy is selfreflection, the production of a performative reality that did not exist prior to the philosophical activity. Philosophy speculates on itself, that is, on its own tradition, generalizing the experience of the canonicity of (literary, juridical, religious) texts which was already typical of pre-philosophical hermeneutics: a canonical text, rather than simply describing a given reality, transmits and stylizes ways of living. This discourse, among other things, involves the Hegelian question of art as a thing of the past, i.e. the death of art. It is philosophically problematic to see art as the simple sensible appearance of the idea, that is, something that, from its beginning, is already (at least ideally) overcome and destined for something else, beyond itself. The Heideggerian concept of art as truth setting itself to work, that is, as the realization of a truth that did not exist before the artwork and which does not persist outside of it, saves art not only from the death sentence issued by Hegel, but also from to the narrow category of “works of art” as the sunday of life in which Romantic art was stuck, thereby reiterating its condemnation. Art and philosophy join forces, from a hermeneutical point of view, due to the fact that in both cases there is an experience of the canonicity of texts in which the philosophical or literary word, in its speculative dimension, establishes and opens up a world that did not exist before. And this is not meant in a necessarily auratic or mysterious sense. The self-reflexivity of literature is not the lack of meaning of a self-understanding poésie pure that is both emphatic and reductive, but the attempt to say something else while speaking of itself. The claim to truth made by art (and now by philosophy, too) cannot be safeguarded by appealing to some mystery (after all, every enigma can be solved, as soon as it is defined as such), but through the thematization of the canonicity of philosophical and literary texts, which establish a world that did not exist before them. Beyond certain self-misunderstandings, such as the insistence, systematically disregarded, on temporal ecstasies, on madeleines, etc., this is what Proust achieved in In Search of Lost Time, which is a philosophical work precisely because it rivals philosophy. The speculative dimension of the Search

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consists precisely in having stylized some universals of human action (Swann, Charlus, Albertine, Odette, etc.) while speaking of itself, and in having transmitted them to generations of readers as a properly epistemological legacy, thus fulfilling the purpose that Proust had set for his work: that of being a telescope or a pair of glasses with which every reader can read inside themselves. M.F. Milan, March 1987

Note The passages from À la recherche du temps perdu quoted in the text come from the Gallimard edition of 1960–61 (M. Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by P. Clarac and A. Ferré, Gallimard, « Plèiade », Paris 1960–61); the English translation (originally entitled Remembrance of Things Past, but better known as In Search of Lost Time) is by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, with the exception of Time Regained (1931), which was translated by Stephen Hudson. The full English translation, which is a revised version of the one published by Chatto & Windus (London) in the 1920s, is available online at Project Gutenberg Australia: http://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty-n-z.html#proust.

The Sweet Cheat Gone Un éclair … puis la nuit—Fugitive beauté Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître, Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité? Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être! Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais, O toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais! In the last two triplets of Baudelaire’s A une passante, we find the model of a theory of experience and passions. Proust will develop it in the Search, first of all in the figure of Albertine, the “fugitive” par excellence, but more generally in all the love affairs and worldly events contained in the novel, so as to draw up a moral of the work as a whole. In fact, in the Search, love stories are made of escapes, misunderstandings, distance and disagreement: in the relationships between Charlus and Charlie Morel, Charles Swann and Odette, or Saint-Loup and Rachel, the beloved—as the Narrator will say about Albertine—is an “être de fuite”. And the object of desire is loved precisely as long as it runs away; when (as in the case of Swann and Odette) ownership becomes definitive, passion vanishes. Swann discovers that he has wasted his time on a woman who was not even his type, and only then marries Odette to start with her an obvious ménage. Society is no different. The Narrator finds the way leading to the Guermantes on his walks in Combray; later, at the theater, he sees the princes de Guermantes and tries to guess their conversations; he goes to live in the palace of the dukes of Guermantes, and (with a hard-boiled style that we will find again in his story with Albertine) he follows the duchess Oriane. But when at last he is welcomed by the dukes and introduced into their environment, he is disappointed or baffled by the meanness of the Faubourg, by the stupidity of the duchess, by the rudeness of the duke, by the madness of the Baron de Charlus, by the reversibility of the social roles for which Madame Verdurin may become princess of Guermantes, and Bloch, under a different name, a gentleman. But the fascination for fleetingness, as opposed to the banality of what is known, is not only a psychological law. Instead, it defines the more general sense of the Search. In the novel, time is lost not because it is simply past, but because its flow is interwoven with misunderstandings, masks, transformations such that every being and every event has multiple faces that continually transform our experiences. The sexual metamorphoses and social migrations

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004431232_002

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of the Search are, in fact, the only ways in which, according to Proust, one can have a non-trivial experience (that is, not tarnished or erased by habit and disillusion). Misunderstandings, jealousy, escapes and betrayals are therefore not simply recurring features of love stories, but rather the most acute forms of experience according to Proust. And Albertine, être de fuite, a liar and an ­adulteress, is both the type-figure of the characters of the novel, and the more general metaphor of the ideology and gnoseology of the Search. 1

The Fugitive

If Albertine is explicitly qualified as a “fugitive” only in the last phase of her story (when the Narrator is told by Françoise that “Mademoiselle Albertine has gone”), her escape actually started much earlier. Indeed, it coincides with the first time the Narrator saw her on the pier, in Balbec: Seul, je restai simplement devant le Grand-Hôtel à attendre le moment d’aller retrouver ma grand’mère, quand, presque encore à l’extrémité de la digue où elles faisaient mouvoir une tache singulière, je vis s’avancer cinq ou six fillettes, aussi différentes, par l’aspect et par les façons, de toutes les personnes auxquelles on était accoutumé à Balbec, qu’aurait pu l’être, débarquée on ne sait d’où, une bande de mouettes qui exécute à pas comptés sur la plage—les retardataires rattrapant les autres en ­voletant—une promenade dont le but semble aussi obscur aux baigneurs qu’elles ne paraissent pas voir, que clairement déterminé pour leur esprit d’oiseaux.1 At the time of this first encounter, Gisèle, Andrée, Rosemonde, and Albertine are not only extraneous to the surrounding environment, but confused and indeterminate, so that the Narrator does not know how to assign a precise individuality to each of them. They have characteristic features (they express a 1 i, 788; Within A Budding Grove: « Left by myself, I was simply hanging about in front of the Grand Hotel until it was time for me to join my grandmother, when, still almost at the far end of the paved ‘front’ along which they projected in a discordant spot of colour, I saw coming towards me five or six young girls, as different in appearance and manner from all the people whom one was accustomed to see at Balbec as could have been, landed there none knew whence, a flight of gulls which performed with measured steps upon the sands—the dawdlers using their wings to overtake the rest—a movement the purpose of which seems as obscure to the human bathers, whom they do not appear to see, as it is clearly determined in their own birdish minds ».

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certain defying attitude and are dressed casually, whence the Narrator recognizes them as belonging to a lower social milieu), but ces traits, je n’avais encore indissolublement attaché aucun d’entre eux à l’une des jeunes filles plutôt qu’à l’autre; et quand […] je voyais émerger un ovale blanc, des yeux noirs, des yeux verts, je ne savais pas si c’était les mêmes qui m’avaient déjà apporté du charme tout à l’heure, je ne ­pouvais pas les rapporter à telle jeune fille que j’eusse séparée des autres et reconnue. Et cette absence, dans ma vision, des démarcations que j’établirais ­bientôt entre elles, propageait à travers leur groupe un flottement h ­ armonieux, la translation continue d’une beauté fluide, collective et mobile.2 The “band” is swift and confused. Proust insists a lot on this indifferentiation combined with speed, which gives the encounter a miraculous touch: the group of young girls, as we read on the same pages, « progressait […] comme une lumineuse comète »; they « forçaient personnes arrêtées à s’écarter ainsi que sur le passage d´une machine qui eût été lâchée et dont il fallait pas attendre qu’elle évitât les piétons  ».3 And, shortly after, the Narrator (with words that recall precisely A une passante) enunciates the psychological law by which  the charm of the “little band” consists entirely in its transience and indiscernibility: Et même le plaisir que me donnait la petite bande, noble comme si elle était composée de vierges helléniques, venait de ce qu’elle avait quelque chose de la fuite des passantes sur la route. Cette fugacité des êtres qui ne sont pas connus de nous, qui nous forcent à démarrer de la vie habituelle où les femmes que nous fréquentons finissent par dévoiler leurs tares, nous met dans cet état de poursuite où rien n’arrête plus l’imagination. 2 i, 790: « I saw emerge a pallid oval, black eyes, green eyes, I knew not if these were the same that had already charmed me a moment ago, I could not bring them home to any one girl whom I might thereby have set apart from the rest and so identified. And this want, in my vision, of the demarcations which I should presently establish between them sent flooding over the group a wave of harmony, the continuous transfusion of a beauty fluid, collective and mobile». For an analysis of the « undifferentiated » movement of the “little band” and of the process of progressive individuation of Albertine, see Anti-Oedipe by Deleuze and Guattari. 3 i, 791: « progressed [...] like a luminous comet, » they « forced those who had stopped to talk to step aside, as though from the path of a machine that had been set going by itself, so that it was no good waiting for it to get out of their way ».

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Or dépouiller d’elle nos plaisir, c’est les réduire à eux-mêmes, à rien […]. Il faut que l’imagination, éveillée par l’incertitude de pouvoir atteindre son objet, crée un but qui nous cache l’autre et, en substituant au plaisir sensuel l’idée de pénétrer dans une vie, nous empêche de reconnaître ce plaisir, d’éprouver son goût véritable, de le restreindre à sa portée.4 This, in short, is the general law of the search for lost time. Unexpected appearances suggest unknown lives; but (keep in mind Proust’s polemic against habit) the sure ownership of what escapes attenuates the value of the experience (its mystery, its charm, etc.); to search for lost time means, then, not to relate the truth of history, but to recreate the shock of fugitive visions.5 Of course, it is a matter of fighting against habit, which flattens our experiences. But the banality of habit is opposed by the masks and the metamorphoses of people, which with the changing circumstances and the flow of time take on new faces: a duke met outside the Faubourg looks rather like a con man 4 1, 796: « And indeed the pleasure that was given me by the little band, as noble as if it had been composed of Hellenic virgins, came from some suggestion that there was in it of the flight of passing figures along a road. This fleetingness of persons who are not known to us, who force us to put out from the harbour of life, in which the women whose society we frequent have all, in course of time, laid bare their blemishes, urges us into that state of pursuit in which there is no longer anything to arrest the imagination. But to strip our pleasures of imagination is to reduce them to their own dimensions, that is to say to nothing. [...] We must have imagination, awakened by the uncertainty of being able to attain our object, to create a goal which hides our other goal from us, and by substituting for sensual pleasures the idea of penetrating into a life prevents us from recognising that pleasure, from tasting its true savour, from restricting it to its own range ». 5 On the sometimes disappointing character of certain « fugitive » visions, the Narrator reminds us of a case that seems to parody the encounter with the « little band » (1, 713–714): « Quelques années après celle où j’allai pour la première fois à Balbec, faisant à Paris une course en voiture avec un ami de mon père et ayant aperçu une femme qui marchait vite dans la nuit, je pensai qu’il était déraisonnable de perdre pour une raison de convenances ma part de bonheur dans la seule vie qu’il y ait sans doute, et sautant à terre sans m’excuser, je me mis à la recherche de l’inconnue, la perdis au carrefour de deux rues, la retrouvai dans une troisième, et me trouvai enfin, tout essoufflé, sous un réverbère, en face de la vieille M.me Verdurin que j’évitais partout et qui, heureuse et surprise, s’écria: ‘Oh! comme c’est aimable d’avoir couru pour me dire bonjour!’ ». [« some years after that in which I went for the first time to Balbec, as I was driving through Paris with a friend of my father, and had caught sight of a woman walking quickly along the dark street, I felt that it was unreasonable to forfeit, for a purely conventional scruple, my share of happiness in what may very well be the only life there is, and jumping from the carriage without a word of apology I followed in quest of the stranger; lost her where two streets crossed; caught her up again in a third, and arrived at last, breathless, beneath a street lamp, face to face with old Mme. Verdurin whom I had been carefully avoiding for years, and who, in her delight and surprise, exclaimed: ‘But how very nice of you to have run all this way just to say how d’ye do to me!’ ».]

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or a petty criminal; Charlus’ laughter echoes with the voice of his Bavarian great aunt; when Albertine is asleep, she loses her human traits and reveals the essence of a plant.6 The atavism by which the signs of race and class reappear under a face that seemed familiar (like Swann’s hooked nose, which finally reveals the Jewishness of someone who yet was at one with the Guermantes milieu); the vicious inclinations that induce the same person to live different lives, and that are discovered little by little; the snobbery that drives the duchesses to frequent writers and politicians, migrating from her environment; weddings and successions by which different individuals are gathered under the same name—these mechanisms of metamorphosis, of which the Search is woven, constitute antidotes against the power of habit. Thus, Albertine remains a fugitive; and all the more so the more the Narrator tries to get closer. At their first encounter he finds himself faced with white ovals, and black or green eyes, without succeeding in isolating Albertine’s too distant individuality. Similarly, when he gets closer, she fades, escaping once again both possession and identification (in the kissing scene, for example, Albertine’s face, now seen too closely, breaks up into incongruous fragments, the texture of her skin, her beauty spot…). But it is above all through the Narrator’s jealousy that Albertine, a captive in the Parisian apartment, continues to be (in her intentions, in her encounters, in the lies with which she hides both), a fugitive. In Balbec, after the first failed attempt to kiss her, the Narrator had drawn certain conclusions about Albertine’s morality: «  après n’avoir pas douté, le premier jour, sur la plage, qu’Albertine ne fût dévergondée, puis être passé par des suppositions intermédiaires, il me sembla acquis d’une manière définitive qu’elle était absolument vertueuse ».7 Conclusions that contrast with Albertine’s surrender in Paris, reopening questions about her customs: Mon surplus de science sur la vie (sur la vie moins unie, moins simple que je ne l’avais cru d’abord) aboutissait provisoirement à l’agnosticisme. Que peut-on affirmer, puisque ce qu’on avait cru probable d’abord s’est 6 In A Thousand Plateaus (Continuum, London, 2004, p. 303), Gilles Deleuze analyses Albertine’s plant-becoming as her losing her human mask: « Albertine can always imitate a flower, but it is when she is sleeping and enters into composition with the particles of sleep that her beauty spot and the texture of her skin enter a relation of rest and movement that place her in the zone of a molecular vegetable: the becoming-plant of Albertine ». 7 I, 934; Within A Budding Grove: « after having had not the least doubt, that first day, on the beach, of Albertine’s being unchaste, and having then passed through various intermediate assumptions, I seemed to have quite definitely reached the conclusion that she was absolutely virtuous ».

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montré faux ensuite, et se trouve en troisième lieu être vrai? (Et hélas, je n’étais pas au bout de mes découvertes avec Albertine).8 From now on, the Narrator’s interest for Albertine will lie entirely in jealousy and suspicion9: « Sans me sentir le moins du monde amoureux d’Albertine, sans faire figurer au nombre des plaisirs les moments que nous passions ­ensemble, j’étais resté préoccupé de l’emploi de son temps ».10 Through jealousy, Albertine remains mysterious and fugitive; only insofar as he is jealous can the Narrator believe he knows some hidden truths. He ceaselessly repeats how little he cares for Albertine’s mediocre beauty, or her intelligence; beauty and intelligence are in fact “general” and “superficial” qualities that can be found everywhere (in salons, in conversations with educated friends, in books), and that easily fall into the fixity of habit. What the Narrator expects from Albertine is flight or infidelity, that is, a power of renewal and metamorphosis. Because in her lies, in the more or less successful expedients she uses to hide her acts, the Narrator finds a more essential truth than that offered by dialogue and intelligence. Interrogating Albertine, trying to reconstruct her past, to make her contradict herself, to notice the symptoms of a lie like a policeman, the Narrator finds a different truth from that of common sense: a truth as a temporary appearance, as a fugitive fact, as a slip of the tongue that, revealing a lie, lets him sense the depths and the masks hidden behind Albertine’s face.11 This overlapping of masks, slips, and lies is the most precise sense of time and memory: the clearest experience of a truth that is not trivially realistic and plausible. The Narrator explicitly says so when talking about his jealousy: 8

9 10 11

ii, 361; I Guermantes: « My surplus knowledge of life (of a life less uniform, less simple than I had at first supposed it to be) inclined me provisionally towards agnosticism. What can one positively affirm, when the thing that one thought probable at first has then shewn itself to be false and in the third instance turns out true? And alas, I was not yet at the end of my discoveries with regard to Albertine». « The Proustian narrator has little relation to Werther. Is he even a lover? He is merely jealous  ». (R. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse. Fragments, Hill and Wang, New York 2001, p. 144). iii, 21; The Captive: « Without feeling that I was the least bit in the world in love with Albertine, without including in the list of my pleasures the moments that we spent together, I was still preoccupied with the way in which she disposed of her time ». « Quite frequently, it is by language that the other is altered; the other speaks a different word, and I hear rumbling menacingly a whole other world,which is the world of the other. Whcen Albcertince drops the trivial phrase “get her pot broken,” the Proustian narrator is horrified, for it is the dreaded ghetto of female homosexuality, of crude cruising, which is suddenly revealed thereby:a whole scene through the keyhole language » (R. Barthes, op. cit., pp. 26–27).

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Et je me rendais compte qu’Albertine n’était pas même pour moi (car si son corps était au pouvoir du mien, sa pensée échappait aux prises de ma pensée) la merveilleuse captive dont j’avais cru enrichir ma demeure […]; m’invitant sous une forme pressante, cruelle et sans issue, à la recherche du passé, elle était plutôt comme une grande déesse du Temps.12 Shortly thereafter, Albertine really did flee. The Narrator then instructed SaintLoup to go look for her in Touraine, at her aunt’s, but the attempt failed, so that, slowly, Albertine also disappeared from the Narrator’s passionate memory (which, over time, had collected a number of signs of Albertine’s erotomania and infidelity, but no decisive proof). Only on one occasion, many years later, in Venice, did he hear from Albertine, through a telegram: “My dear, you think me dead, forgive me, I am quite alive, should like to see you, talk about marriage, when do you return? Love. Albertine.” But once again it turned out there had been a mistake: the telegram was actually about Gilberte Swann’s wedding with Robert de Saint-Loup. 2

Truth, Misunderstandings, Rumours

As in James’ Turn of the Screw, even long after the death of his friend the Narrator is unable to guess the truth about her actions and inclinations. And this chain, which connects fuite with misunderstanding, error, and rumours, is the most precise meaning of the theory of experience exposed in the Search. On this point, Deleuze was very explicit: the philosophical value of the Proustian novel consists in showing the interested and passionate origins of the search for truth, against a (Platonic-metaphysical) tradition which sees the truth as the effect of disinterested dialogue: “the truth is not revealed, it is betrayed; it is not communicated, it is interpreted; it is not willed, it is involuntary”.13 The truth comes from distractions and involuntary reflexes: Albertine lies on principle, and is sincere only by mistake; Charlus flaunts a virility he doesn’t have, and holds very open speeches on homosexuality, considering them unscrupulous, while the audience takes them as confessions; the Narrator, joking with 12

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iii , 386–387; The captive: «(for if her body was in the power of mine, her mind escaped from the grasp of mine). And I became aware that Albertine was not even for me the marvellous captive with whom I had thought to enrich my home, [...] urging me with a cruel and fruitless pressure to the remembrance of the past, she resembled, if anything, a mighty goddess of Time ». G. Deleuze, Proust and signs, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000, p. 95.

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Albertine, imagines the day when they will have left each other, without imagining that things would actually end up just like that. However, according to Deleuze (at least in Marcel Proust et les signes),14 the signs of society and love, which are deceptive and endowed with double or triple meanings, refer to a higher level, that of the certain signs of art or of ­Essence, so that the work of art can say something definitive on the oscillating world of experience: « The worldly signs chiefly a time wasted; the signs of love envelop especially a time lost. The sensuous signs often afford us the means of regaining time, restore it to us at the heart of time lost. The signs of art, finally, give us a time regained, an original absolute time that includes all the others. […] And it is in the absolute time of the work of art that all the other dimensions are united and find the truth that corresponds to them ».15 In this perspective (which is indeed faithful to the idea that Proust himself had of the Search), however misleading or equivocal our experiences of the world may be, the work of art would still be able to bring them back to a conclusive truth. However, the presence and function of escape, misunderstanding, metamorphosis and disguise are so strong in the Search—beyond the final claim of art as redemption—as to suggest that they constitute the gnoseological substance of the narrative. In this sense, the work would be not so much the history of a time finally regained, but rather the trace of a constitutively fallacious and lost experience.16 Albertine is the typical example of this experience of metamorphosis and truth as a misunderstanding or a slip of the tongue. But the whole novel is filled with identity transformations and social migrations. In all love affairs we see the same shady areas and the same falsifications. Moreover, just as Albertine is first a collective entity, then a captive, and finally a fugitive, so Odette will appear, over time, as a “lady in pink”, as Miss Sacripant painted by Elstir (who at that time called himself Monsieur Biche), as Swann’s wife, and as the lady of Forcheville; again, Rachel, who fascinates Saint-Loup, but not the ­Narrator (who met her in a brothel) and is a mediocre actress, will end up ­becoming a really great actress, displacing Berma from her theatrical throne. 14

More recently, it seems to me that Deleuze has inclined his interpretation towards a reading of the Search as a pure experience of the transient and the fugitive (cf. e.g. A Thousand Plateaus cit.). 15 Deleuze, Proust and signs, cit., pp. 24–25. 16 « Proust, through his energetic decision, tried to make into a movement of resurrection of the pasto But what did he reconstÏtute? What did he save? The imaginary past of an already entirely imaginary being, separated from himself by a whole vacillating and fugitive series of ‘l’s,’ who little by little stripped him of a self, freed him from the past ». (M. Blanchot, The Book to Come, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2003, p.17).

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The matinée at the princes of Guermantes, placed in the final part of the novel in which we find the exposition of Proust’s poetics, appears as an accentuation of this constitutive character of disguise and equivocation (moral, sexual, social). After having devoted many pages to the controversy against realism, against the absurd claim of telling the truth in relation to something so uncertain as experience, we witness a description of the princess’s living room (and the princess, remember, is no longer the same person the Narrator used to know, but the ridiculous Mme. Verdurin), presented as a dream land or a masquerade laden with inaccuracies, oversights, and misunderstandings: Ce n’était pas que l’aspect de ces personnes qui donnait l’idée de personnes de songe. Pour elles-mêmes la vie, déjà ensommeillée dans la jeunesse et l’amour, était de plus en plus devenue un songe. Elles avaient oublié jusqu’à leurs rancunes, leurs haines, et pour être certaines que c’était à la personne qui était là qu’elles n’adressaient plus la parole il y a dix ans, il eût fallu qu’elles se reportassent à un registre, mais qui était aussi vague qu’un rêve où on a été insulté on ne sait plus par qui.17 Charlus, as a result of a paralysis, has lost the sense of the social hierarchies that distinguished him, and greets the guests inappropriately; the duchess of Guermantes speaks indecorously, « par la pente qu’elle descendait du milieu des Guermantes agréables à la société des comédiennes »;18 the “new ones”, who have recently entered into society, are deceived about the situation of the people they meet (which recalls the analogous misunderstandings in which the Narrator fell at the time of his entry into society). Fashion and Death19 intertwine, revoking any certainty about the experience of lost time. Even Bloch has become an elegant person: 17

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iii, 973; Time regained: « It was not only in appearance that these people were like dreamfigures, their youth and love had become to themselves a dream. They had forgotten their very resentments and hatreds and, to be sure that this individual was the one they had not spoken to for ten years, they would have needed a register which even then would have had the vagueness of a dream in which an insult has been offered them by one unknown ». iii, 1028: « owing to her easy and gradual descent from the Guermantes environment to the society of actresses ». In Leopardi’s Dialogue Between Fashion and Death, one can find the topics of the transitory and the fleeting that Proust shares with Baudelaire and Flaubert. In particular, the link between fashion and death in Proust acts both as an exaltation of the ephemeral (Baudelaire), and as emphasis on the meaningless and the obvious as the supporting structures of experience (Flaubert). For an analysis of the link between fashion and death see Gianni Carchia, La legittimazione dell’arte, Guida, Napoli 1982.

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Il vient dans des salons où il n’eût pas pénétré il y a vingt ans ». Mais il avait aussi vingt ans de plus. Il était plus près de la mort. A quoi cela l’avançait-il? De près, dans la translucidité d’un visage où, de plus loin et mal éclairé, je ne voyais que la jeunesse gaie (soit qu’elle y survécût, soit que je l’y évoquasse), se tenait le visage presque effrayant, tout anxieux, d’un vieux Shylock attendant, tout grimé, dans la coulisse, le moment d’entrer en scène, récitant déjà le premier vers à mi-voix. Dans dix ans, dans ces salons où leur veulerie l’aurait imposé, il entrerait en béquillant, devenu « maître », trouvant une corvée d’être obligé d’aller chez les La Tremolile. A quoi cela l’avancerait-il?20 Like the signs of love (subverted by jealousy and inversion), the signs of society are also equivocal and largely meaningless, subject to changes in fashion (in times of war you invite generals, during the Dreyfus scandal you invite first nationalists and then Dreyfus supporters, etc.), and above all to the determinations of death, which decomposes and recomposes the salons. And yet, if one thinks of the kind of experience that Proust wanted to communicate through the Search, one realizes that he has placed the most precise meaning of the Narrator’s apprentissage in this image of the transient, of the misunderstanding, of the meaningless. And this experience overlooks, and overshadows, the teleological value and the extramundane purpose of the work. Whatever his attitude, of euphoria or affliction, the Narrator speaks to us only of the transitory and deceitful: as a spectator raptured in front of the waving blur of the little girls on the Balbec pier; as an inquisitor who tries to extort from Albertine the truth about her actions; as a chronicler of the social metamorphoses of the Faubourg. The apprentissage is indeed the experience of lies, of misunderstandings, of unattainable objects (because they only exist in the imagination of the one who wants them, according to the principles of what Proust defines as his “idealism”). A novel, a book to come, in the intentions of the Narrator, should certainly provide a further truth about this experience of the uncertain, a truth that is 20

iii, 966–967: « ‘He’s coming into a drawing-room which he could never have penetrated twenty years ago.’ But he was also twenty years older and he was nearer death, what good will it do him? Looking at him closely, I perceived in the face upon which the light now played, which from further away and when less illumined seemed to reflect youthful gaiety whether because it actually survived there or I evoked it, the almost alarming visage of an old Shylock anxiously awaiting in the wings the moment to appear upon the stage, reciting his first lines under his breath. In ten years he would limp into these drawingrooms dragging his feet over their heavy piled carpets, a master at last, and would be bored to death by having to go to the La Trémouilles. How would that profit him? ».

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not empirical or transitory. On the other hand, that novel, conceived in Time Regained, has never been written, and the image of experience that is transmitted to us by the Search is rather that of a purely possible truth, linked to chance, deceit, fashion, passions—an experience of the truth that exceeds, in depth and verisimilitude, the truths of dialogue, intelligence, reasonableness: « Ce qui m’occupait l’esprit n’était pas ce qu’elle avait pu dire d’intelligent, mais tel mot qui éveillait chez moi un doute sur ses actes ».21 21

iii, 95; The Captive: « What occupied my mind was not the intelligent remark that she might have made, but some chance utterance that had aroused in me a doubt as to her actions ».

Notebooks and Novel 1

Unpublished Works

The qualities that Proust wanted to attribute to In Search of Lost Time (the book of a lifetime, the story of a literary vocation that is announced once the novel is finished) do not fail to raise the question of the concept of “unpublished” in Proust, and generally of all the works he wrote before the Search. According to the logic and the theodicy of the novel, in fact, all the writings prior to the Search (and the Search itself as we know it) are unpublished works, or at least texts rejected by the poetic project of their author (the Narrator, in the Search, refers to a single text, the well-known article for Figaro). No mention is made of the other numerous journalistic collaborations (Figaro, Nouvelle Revue Française, etc., which are often anticipations of passages of the Search); nor is there any reference to the collection Les Plaisirs et les Jours, or to the preface to Sésame et les Lys or to Contre Sainte-Beuve or to Jean Santeuil— works that Proust probably never expected to see gathered together and printed. On the other hand, outside of the aesthetic theodicy, when one separates the Narrator from Proust, and then Proust himself from his success, one realizes that few literary legacies are as well known and widely published as Proust’s unpublished works.1 Therefore, a collection of unpublished works, in principle, has few secrets to reveal. It is enough to bear in mind that Gianfranco Contini has been conducting a critical study of the Proustian variants since 1947.2 At the time, he had found the many pieces of the Search that Proust had given to newspapers and magazines, and were then resumed and modified in the novel. In addition, Contini had access to the Grasset drafts of the first edition of Swann, as well as to a relatively wide critical literature on the theme (Pierre-Quint, 1928; Feuillerat, 1934). Six years later he was able to compare the Search with its “infancy”, that is to say with the text of Jean Santeuil, the long unfinished novel that retrospectively prepared the grounds of the Search. In the meantime, studies had come out by Maurois (1949) and Fallois (1952) with extensive extracts from unpublished works—as well as an examination of the jeunes filles drafts published in Egypt in 1946 by Etiemble. Contre Sainte-Beuve (the critical study in dialogic-narrative form whose abandonment, in 1908, constitutes the most immediate background to the drafting of the Search) would soon be added to this 1 For all bibliographical references, see the Note at the end of the present essay. 2 M. Proust, L’età dei nomi, ed. by D. De Agostini and M. Ferraris, Mondadori, Milano 1985.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004431232_003

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corpus of variants. Then there were the editions and inventories of the Proustian notebooks in the Cahiers Marcel Proust, including the recent edition (1981) of brouillons thematically connected with Time Regained, which Bernard Brun and Henri Bonnet edited for Gallimard. Obviously, a passage of the Search published on a magazine is different from draft, and a draft is different from a novel. This is all the more so given that the definition of “unpublished” has been very heterogeneous depending on the editors. In some cases there has been a diplomatic transcription of Proustian passages from the Cahiers that can be connected in some way to the Search. In others, the Proustian notebooks were collected according to a probable diegetic logic, and long units were reconstructed which, a posteriori, appear as “rough copies” of the Search. This happened with Bonnet and Brun; but Brun himself noted that Proust’s composition was not a simple passage from notes, to rough copy, to the final draft, but rather consisted of a rhapsodic and circular pattern, so that there are only fragments, unified only later, in the preparation of the text for the publisher, which were then still reworked and expanded into drafts. In other cases—Jean Santeuil and, above all, Contre Sainte-Beuve—the publishers have chosen to autonomize an unfinished project, but also a backstory (in some cases a literal one, and therefore a “rough copy”) of the Search. Strictly speaking, we can ask what makes Contre Sainte-Beuve a separate text, and not a brouillon of the Search, and what instead makes the brouillons of the Guermantes matinée published by Bonnet and Brun a “rough copy” of Time ­Regained: in both cases we are dealing with a reconstruction ex post. It is therefore very difficult, if not to establish what is meant by “unpublished works”, at least to indicate what is meant by “unpublished parts of the Search”. To do so, one should first know what the Search is, conceptually. However, that very concept is not easy to outline, and the brouillons, instead of clarifying it, make it more blurry and aleatory. Indeed, they put us in physical contact with a laborious method of composition. In the Cahiers, Proust developed some objectively recurring themes and decided to situate them at some point in the narrative; then the development of the story imposed unpredictable turning points. This was also due to practical contingencies: for example, with the Great War the publisher ceased the publication of the Search, so there was more time to write, and therefore to enlarge a literary project that initially had to be divided into two volumes only. Conversely, Proust’s death in 1922 meant that the last volumes did not undergo the process of growth and transformation that had characterized the rest of the novel. The metaphor of the Search as a cathedral is fitting for the monumentality of the work accomplished, but also for its construction, which was highly conditioned by the availability of materials and time to work. Proust had the beginning and the

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end ready very early on; the rest—that is, most of the novel—was added along the way. So it is legitimate to ask, as Gerard Genette did, what would have become of the Search if Proust had not died quite young; presumably, there would be some extra volumes and, above all, many parts of The Sweet Cheat Gone and even more of Time Regained would fall back to a state of unpublished works and lend themselves, if preserved, to a genetic critique. Moreover, already in the novel as we know it, Swann seems much closer to Time Regained than to the other volumes, precisely because the beginning and the end of the work were written together, and very early on; in both cases we are dealing with survivors of earlier periods: Swann because it was published before the Great War, when the literary project was not yet that of a romanfleuve, and Time Regained because it was published after Proust’s death, and therefore was neither completely ready for printing nor expanded in the proof stage. “Unpublished” in the very corpus of the Search, these two volumes present many characteristics of the unpublished works: the narrative about Swann shows the recent traces of the decision to pass from the third to the first person, so much so that the story of the Narrator and Albertine repeats the essentials of the one of Swann and Odette. On the other hand, the reflective digressions of Time Regained, which do not blend completely with the fabric of the story and of the conversations, show a state of incompleteness that is typical of unpublished works (certain passages expose theories, others narrate events and report conversations; it is the climate of Contre Sainte-Beuve, and the emulsion between reasoning and narrative takes place only in the draft for the press). As said, there are oscillations between first and third person, which produce an iteration of events referred to the Narrator or to the various deuteragonists (Swann, Charlus, Saint-Loup; for the “feminine series”, Odette, Gilberte, Albertine, Oriane…). There is a constant alternation of speculative passages, narratives, causeries. In short, the image with which Gilles Deleuze characterized the Search, i.e. “a shapeless nebula”, can be found everywhere in the novel, and finds systematic expression in the unpublished works. So how can we speak of unpublished works in an absolute and rigorous sense? Unless we strictly adhere to material criteria, we find a degree of hesitation and unfinished business right in the heart of the novel. The determination of the concept of unpublished can only be relative: something is less published than something else. And how to mark a clear distinction between unpublished in general and unpublished of the Search in all of Proust’s posthumous work, where there is no direct sanction by the author? On the basis of what obvious criterion can one argue that Contre Sainte-Beuve is an unpublished work in its own right and not an unpublished part of the Search? An even more complicated problem—essentially the problem par excellence of unpublished

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works in general—is to establish the possible context of a certain fragment in relation to its destination in the Search. For example, a certain character may bear the name of a character in the Search, and also share certain qualities that we will find in the novel, but also present other qualities and events, often very detailed, that literally repeat features of another character. So how can one establish the right context? How can one determine a sure way to organize a possible diegetic development of the unpublished material in parallel with that of the Search? In most cases, the criterion is undecidable: the brouillons are not only the imprecise preparation of the novel, but they open up more perspectives on various possible novels, of which some were dropped, while others survived. 2

What the Cahiers Can Teach Us

In addition to requiring a general cautiousness about the concept of “unpublished parts of the Search” and about the determination of the right context, the Cahiers also embody more positive teachings (it being understood that they do not bear the radical disclosure of some mystery nor any truly unpublished acquisitions). I’ll summarize them by points: 1. First, they add more detail to our image of Proust’s style, through the material explanation of his method of composition. For reasons of economy and competence, on this point I refer the reader to the essay that Bernard Brun dedicated to this problem.3 I will simply note that the Cahiers empirically corroborate Contini’s theses in his controversy with Feuillerat. There is no “Proust A” (psychologist and esthete) as opposed to a “Proust B” (analyst and sociologist): this does not exist in the novel, as Contini argues, and does not exist in the Cahiers. The unpublished works show a fundamental stylistic unity. Evolutions and developments are, if anything, thematic; in the unpublished works Proust is very hesitant with respect to the concrete narrative developments to be given to his story, so that a certain passage, a certain conversation, a certain aesthetic or sociological note may appear at a given point, attributed to a certain character, and then move on to a completely heterogeneous context; but aesthetics, poetics, psychology, sociology alternate recursively throughout the whole of the brouillons. The stylistic fracture, therefore, does not take place ­according to a progressive unfolding, but rather in a single stroke, that is, 3 B. Brun, «  Storia dì un testo: i Cahiers della Recherche  », in L’età dei nomi, cit., pp. xxxv– xlvi.

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2.

3.

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in the passage from the brouillons to the definitive text (all the brouillons resemble each other, if only for their iterative, fragmentary and rhapsodic form; and this is what separates them from the novel). In the preparation of the text for the publisher, several regulatory bodies are involved: Proust organizes the various fragments, excluding inconsistencies, and brings together impressions, lines of reasoning, conversations, and the actual story in a coherent fabric; in this it would seem that he is guided by a sort of stylistic super-ego (made of his favorite authors, Flaubert, George Sand, etc.) to regulate a material that is not very well formed, and which is rather reminiscent of a flow. The stylistic research—and this may perhaps be surprising—seems to have been done rather late, in relation to the construction of great narrative units (this organizational and normative work corresponds, on the stylistic level, to the censorship that, on the content level, is another characteristic of the passage from unpublished work to novel). The differentiation of this narrative nebula involves every aspect of the final text, and in particular the choice of names. There is a chain linking the names to the characters. Proust’s entire poetics in the Search insists on the causal scope of the names; the name has an internal necessity that affects the narrative developments connected to it (evocative power in the sound “Parma”, and the like). The unpublished works show rather the opposite: the fantastic effectiveness of the name is the result, and not the cause, of an affective and literary elaboration; if not in its profound genesis, at least in its effectiveness and in its definitive form, the name is the result of a mainly intertextual work. A very similar point can be made for the characters. Here, too, Proust credited the hypothesis of an external causality (“j’écris sous la dietée de mes personages”), in solidarity with the aesthetic theodicy in the novel, for which the work of art would come from the outside, in a “fortuitous and inevitable” way. Instead, necessity (and causality) seem to precede individual characters. This process is due to multiple causes: the elaboration of a deep core (for example, the projection and distribution of certain elements of guilt in the author onto several characters: Jewishness to Swann and homosexuality to Charlus); the influence of external biographical circumstances (anecdotes, people he knew); strictly novelistic necessities (make a certain part of the Search work). In no case is there an abstract and pre-established causality. The three points I have just listed are mutually connected, and refer to a more general hypothesis about the Search. The mentioned “fortuitous and inevitable” character is not a property of the novel, but a thesis of

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which the text wants to be the demonstration: names and characters could be completely different; and the Search is rather the not-entirelydefinitive outcome, on a conceptual level, of a series of attempts attested by Jean Santeuil, Contre Sainte-Beuve, and the Cahiers of the Bibliothèque Nationale. These attempts elaborate a certain number of affective nuclei that in turn manifest themselves in different characters, whose names are in fact secondary—so much so that in the brouillons they vary without consequences. The gestation of this elementary nucleus of affection is fully attested by the brouillons (in them we find a more detailed explanation of a certain family resemblance which unites various characters and which is already perceived in the novel). 3 Names According to the explicit theodicy of the Search, proper names (of places and people, often superimposed as in the case of aristocratic family names) would perform three functions in three different ages. In an early age, l’âge des noms, names exert an enormous influence on the imagination: starting from them, one fantasizes about unknown people and places, trying to deduce their qualities from the onomastic forms; the railway timetable, the Almanach de Gotha and the Country House Year Book become lands full of dreams and adventure, because they allow one to daydream about cities and people of which all one knows is the name. The second phase of literary and psychological apprenticeship, the age of words, systematically denies the fantasies of the previous one: the things seen and the people known contradict the fantasies of the reader of guides and yearbooks: the names turn out to be nothing but words, with no necessary relationship with the thing they designate. But there is a third phase, more complicated and full of artistic consequences. Factual refutations do not fully cancel out the onomastic fantasies: our imagination survives and coexists with reality. In memory these two are both simultaneously active, and one would say a half truth if one wanted to reduce a name to a thing, erasing the role that it has played in the imagination. The purpose of the work of art therefore consists in returning both these dimensions; the controversy against literary realism and the demonization of habit work together with the dialectic of names. Giving back the past and recognizing the true meaning that things and people have had for us entails a reconstruction of the different ways in which we have known them, as a fantasy and as an objective reality («  Il me fallait rendre aux moindres signes qui m’entournaient leur sens que l’habitude leur avait fait perdre pour moi  »).

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Hence a significant consequence both for the theory of experience and for the aesthetic theodicy expressed in the Search: names must present themselves as necessary and arbitrary at the same time. If they were not necessary for our imagination, we could not verify their arbitrariness with experience, so as to draw all the poetic effects of this dialectic. But what determines the imaginary necessity of the name? On this point, critics have sometimes taken Proust’s explicit statements about the causal and absolute character of names too literally. Certainly the Narrator deposits onomastic, geographical and historical fantasies in the name Guermantes: Guermantes is the name of a “way” which was the destination of his childhood walks, as well as the name of the house of Gilbert the Bad, lord of Guermantes, represented in the stained glass window of the Saint-Hilaire church in Combray (and that with his feudal image gives a Merovingian aura to the concrete figure of the Guermantes lady sitting on the bench during mass). So the name Guermantes becomes charged with archaic nuances and romantic charm (can we exclude the influence of the adjective “charmant”, also bearing in mind that one of Guermantes’ intermediate names was “Garman-tes”?). But, with equal evidence, we realize how these onomastic fantasies are also the premise for their profanation through experience. The Merovingian seductiveness of the Guermantes lineage (with all the onomastic necessity it carries with it) is, at the same time, the premise of many refutations: the duchess is a Guermantes, but she talks a lot of nonsense, and it gets worse over time; the title of princess of Guermantes during the novel designates both Marie-Gilbert, more feudal than her cousin Oriane, and Madame Verdurin, who married the prince in a third marriage (symmetrically, the palace of the prince was sold to an American billionaire); the prince, for his part, is a king worthy of an operetta in the bal de têtes. Not so much the absoluteness of a nominal aura, but the dialectic that it entertains with the alteration and metamorphosis of the name constitute the core of Proust’s onomastic poetics. Every name is necessary, but only in so far as it lends itself to being ­disfigured— with a desire for profanation that is typical of Proustian psychology—to shed light on atavisms that its sound alone could not have suggested: Gilberte changes fewer names than her mother Odette, but when she pronounces the name Swann the German way, and not the English way, for fear of revealing her Jewish origins, she has already betrayed her father’s memory; after all she will become Mademoiselle de Forcheville and then Madame de Saint-Loup, following a profanatory logic (Forcheville, the antagonist of Swann; Saint-Loup, the fallen idol of the Narrator). This change has a precise meaning, and confirms the onomastic need in an indirect way—the one in use in the novel’s literary system, which is the only thing with a legislative function. (Bloch is Jewish; in

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Time Regained he calls himself Jacques du Rozier, and is now a ­gentleman; but his pseudo-aristocratic surname evokes the Rue des Rosiers, in the Parisian ghetto). Proust’s effort to construct norms that will be denied or disfigured by experience is fully documented by the Cahiers. The metamorphic process is here taken to extremes. The conscious literary project is combined with the aleatory nature of the work in progress, with the inventory of names following one another in surprising chains. Eugène Nicole, a Proustian onomastic specialist, recently emphasized that names, in the Cahiers, do not follow an abstract necessity, but are organized according to a relational process. A name has meaning and necessity only within a certain family of names. Which is literally true for the Guermantes, whose titles and individual coats of arms are rewritten within the coat of arms and the generic name of the house. Besides, their name also evolves and changes over the course of the brouillons, just as the côtés of Guermantes and Méséglise have many names, in the brouillons, but their conceptual and affective opposition to the Narrator remains unaffected and unaltered. We also know that Proust loved establishing symmetries throughout the indefinite development of the novel: for example, Albertine (the character who was based on Proust’s relationship with Alfred Agostinelli) retains the latter’s initials, but forms a symmetry inside the literary system, and relates to Gilberte through the final letters of her name. For Proust, the point is to emphasize the serial nature of love affairs and, more empirically, to create a revealing ambiguity (i.e. to allow for a telegram signed by Gilberte to be mistaken for a message by Albertine). Similarly, Charlie Morel is called Bobby Santois for a long time. Is the change due perhaps to the cultural need for “Frenchness” mentioned by Barthes in the famous essay “Proust and Names”? It may be so, but a more immediate and punctual chance to do so would have lied in the desire to mask the equally unFrench name of Reynaldo Hahn. The question is difficult to resolve in absolute terms of onomastic-onomological necessity. It seems more useful to look at this substitution in a perspective that is immanent to the novel’s literary system. Bobby Santois refers directly to Robert de Saint-Loup (admired by the Narrator as Charlus will admire, for his fluency and diversity, Charlie Morel), and both refer to an onomastic and relational chain that is connected with the Narrator (the “Petit-loup” of the grandmother; with all the profanatory stratifications that this nickname entails, and that will survive in Saint-Loup’s homosexuality). The name changes belatedly, because it is inscribed in another chain, which seems more useful to characterize the violinist beloved by Charlus. To this end, Proust believes it more appropriate to include Santois in the Charles series, that is, among those who (with the literary endorsement of

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Charles Bovary) embody betrayed trust—so that only après coup, after a ­troubled elaboration that is anything but spontaneous, the network of mysterious analogies that bind Charlus and Charlie will be enriched by the dedications « Carolus Caroli » and « Plus Ultra Carolus », which add to the meaning (and the necessity) of the relationship between the two. Elsewhere, onomastic causality is decidedly contradictory. See the case of the name Françoise, which in Jean Santeuil refers to immorality and Jewishness (it is the name of a prefiguration of Odette), while in the Search is an indication of moralism and chauvinistic common sense. We could add, among the many analogous contradictions, the example of Théodore (or Théodule), which indicates, between the brouillons and the Search, the brother of the maid of the Baroness of Putbus, the peasant who raped her, and Charlus’ drunk lover. Evidently Théodore-Theodule does not designate an absolute onomastic necessity, at least if we look at its narrative determinations (which vary between positive and negative, heterosexual and homosexual). However, if the name is abstracted from the various characters in which it is embodied, the constant of an affective contradiction remains; as in the Saint that joins SaintLoup to Santois, and in the Loup that links Robert with the Narrator- « Petit loup  », what remains is the profanation of affections; in the same way, the name Charles is marked by the betrayal of love, be it passive (Swann, Charlus) or active (Charlie Morel). Hence the opposite meaning of primordial words, we could conclude with Freud. Names seems to be linked to certain qualities, but the narrative directions and opportunities distort these characterizations. In Jean Santeuil we have for example a typical case of condensation: the name Bergotte does not designate the writer depicted in the Search, but Elstir, the painter; of the latter, however, the Bergotte of Jean Santeuil has the profession, not the delicacy of mind: he is indeed a nihilist like the writer we know (and like Monsieur Biche in the Search, that is, Elstir in his youth). The genesis of the names appears as a network of relationships marked by impersonal structures and qualities—while their definitive elaboration aims to underline the coherence of a literary system, a novel-index sui which arranges the nominal correspondences according to the narrative needs that arise from time to time. It is within the characterology that is provided by the story that names like Féterne or Cambremer acquire all the immediate derogatory evidence which intuitively marks them (the slightly miasmatic residence far from the healthy Raspelière; the provincial noble whose name reminds us of Camembert, but whom Charlus does not hesitate to turn into Cambremerde); the same applies to key names such as Verdurin (verdure, ordure, Or du Rhin: vulgarity combined with Wagnerian melomania); even more so, only the internal encyclopedia of the novel allows us to appreciate the saint and the

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wolf of the series related to Saint-Loup, or the Charles series which at the same time opens up on a wider literary encyclopedia. The network of relationships is complex: impersonal qualities circulate among the characters, precede them, and a fortiori precede their names; in turn, the names compose chains that are intertwined with the characters and that are decisive only as a nominal and narrative drift suggesting further associations; the literary system itself is a set of relationships, in which intertwining affects, characters and nominal chains flow together. The genetic complexity is equal to that of the dialectic between name, imagination and experience in the novel’s theodicy. 4 Characters Here too, the Search provides a multi-stage dialectic. In the Narrator’s youthful imagination, people are strongly shaped individuals, endowed with attributes that appear to be original and immutable: the Duchess of Guermantes can only be a certain person, and her qualities, cut out of fantasy, are necessarily eternal; the guests at a dinner party must be those and not others, and they must belong to the Guermantes’ milieu; love is unique and irreplaceable (Swann can only love Odette, however much she makes him suffer and is not even his type; same for the Narrator, for Saint-Loup, for Charlus). But this fantasised static nature of the characters is always eventually denied by experience. Hence the disappointment with respect to the Guermantes, who not only do not speak “the language of the gods”, but are an unstable nucleus, tormented like any other environment by degradation and by great social migrations (over time, the duchess becomes increasingly stupid, and in her apparently fixed and eternal living room heterogeneous guests follow one another: people for and against Dreyfus, then the generals of the Great War, and often rude artists, as it used to be in the Verdurin house). Swann, who already appeared at the beginning as a double character (in Combray he is “young Swann”, unsuccessful compared to his stockbroker father; but in Faubourg he is the intimate friend of the Guermantes, who was received at Buckingham Palace by the prince of Wales), goes through several pathetic alterations, both social and physical, which turn him into many different people. Self-marginalized because of Odette, he is then rudely kicked out by the Guermantes (when they are still against Dreyfus); betrayed, he undergoes an instant metamorphosis: the monocle, the freckles, the bristly hair, which were previously admired in society, are suddenly seen as ridiculous (instant passage from the figure of the lover to that of the cuckold); to please Odette he frequents prefects and undersecretaries and boasts about it; illness and social

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­ arginalization then bring out a trait never observed before, his atavistic Sem mitic nose, « plutôt celui d’un vieil Hébreu que d’un curieux Valois », which ratifies the end of the social solidarity that had assimilated him to the Guermantes. This is also the case for another type of atavism, that of Sodom, which alters the presumed immutability of love affairs. Saint-Loup not only ceases to love Rachel and, dismissing his intellectual attitudes, revives a feudal interest in war: but he also ceases to love women in general, just like his uncle Charlus. Just as names end up fully revealing their aleatoriness, so all the human fabric that populates the Search results in a universal alteration of which the bal de têtes is the extreme testimony: the Narrator walks into a living room in which he does not find a single one of the characters he used to know; even their physical attributes are distorted (a certain baroness has unnaturally aged due to drugs, another guest instead was rejuvenated by a diet); Charlus himself, once the guardian of hierarchies, ceremoniously greets people he had previously avoided. Likewise Odette, no longer remembering which of the guests she had an affair with, greets everyone with a half smile—so that, in an unpredictable context, we find Cottard’s embarrassed smile from the time of his first steps in society, when he had not yet assumed an icy and unfriendly mask. This is the level of literary theodicy, and these alterations are the core of the Narrator’s apprenticeship, whose task consists in unfolding in a novel what in the bal de têtes is complicated and almost inextricable: in other words, the task is to explain that those almost monstrous characters, devoid of individuality due to their many metamorphoses, were once people with individual characteristics and qualities. In the narrative project of the Search, the alterations of the characters therefore perform multiple functions: manifesting the action of time in an emblematic and sensible form; highlighting the unpredictable and almost meaningless nature of experience; emphasizing the pathetic effects of memory, which reminds us of individuals and events that are completely different from what we find in the present. And, as with the names, the didactic pleasure is linked to a profanatory intention: even the Narrator changes in character, fulfilling sinister and unbelievable prophecies (in Balbec Charlus outrages the Narrator by questioning his affection for his grandmother; indeed, a few years later, in Paris, Marcel will not care about his dying grandmother and will try to arrange an appointment at the Bois with Madame de Stermaria). Indeed, in the second part of the novel, we see the collective fulfillment of Samson’s prophecy—« La femme aura Gomorrhe et l’homme aura Sodome, les deux sexes mourront l’un à côté de l’autre ».

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Gilles Deleuze has identified two mechanisms of this dialectic between individuation and alteration (see the chapters « Sèrie et groupe » and « Niveaux de la recherche » in his Proustian monograph). First, the individuals that act in the Search—and of which the Narrator wishes to emphasize the uniqueness— immediately reveal a stereotypical and recurrent nature: this is the principle of what Deleuze—taking up the Sartrean characterization—defines as series: all the love affairs that the Narrator has or refers to as absolutes are inscribed in a serial recursion. The hero may try to explain that Gilberte, Oriane and Albertine are unrepeatable exceptions in his eyes, endowed with qualities that cannot be exchanged and capable of evoking unique moods (the snowy Bois de Boulogne, the church of Combray, the Balbec pier); however, the fact remains that every love affair repeats the one that preceded it, with slight variations on a basic scheme, that of the beloved object as an “être de fuite”, which can only be reached under many conditions. These serial variations on an unchangeable scale lay the foundations for the final confusion of the characters (explication of the series and condensation of the individualities: behind Gilberte there are Oriane in Tansonville and Albertine in Venice). One always falls in love in the same way, just as it is always in the same way that one catches a cold. The same recursivity is recorded in the great analogical units established by Proust in the “male series”, made up of the Narrator, Swann, Charlus etc., through very insistent repetitions. The characters, like their names, are governed by a relational principle; the most striking analogies are found in the repetitiveness of the pairs: Swann and the Narrator are very similar, but the Swann-Odette and Narrator-Albertine relationships are almost identical. A network of functions is drawn from which abstract passions emerge behind individual characters and events. Here, too, the demonstrative aim comes with the elaboration of autobiographical blocks. Let’s go back to Deleuze. The serial dynamic is intertwined with another mechanism, the group: “the beloved belongs initially to a group, in which she is not yet individualized” (p. 76). And in fact the beginning of Swann is not dedicated to the description of Odette, but to a phenomenology of the Verdurin clan; Gilberte’s first appearance occurs against the background of family rumors about Swann and his wife, and of the symbolic landscape of Swann’s way; the Narrator falls in love with the coterie Guermantes in general, before falling in love with Oriane; and of course there is the small band of Albertine, Andrée, Gisèle, and Rosemonde (as we shall see shortly, in the unpublished work the band is even more confused than in the novel, and takes us much further). The group activates a selection process. Swann and the Narrator extract the loved one and determine her against the background of a mediocre

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environment, and not without hesitation (should Swann fall in love with Odette? Should the Narrator choose Albertine or Andrée?). Another effort consists in keeping the individuality of the loved one intact, against the spirit of gravity that wants to bring it back to indistinction: Odette does not want to renounce the Verdurins and the Forchevilles, Albertine does not want to give up the environment of the Balbec casino or the Trocadéro, Morel holds on to the conservatory, his comrades, his algebra lessons. Individuation is a transitory state of captivity in which the other is held—it is an intermediate ­condition. The beloved emerges from a group and tends towards new groups; after all, the lover serializes, and in turn produces, by different means, indistinction. Deleuze also speaks of cells and vessels: “Proper names are half-open cases that project their qualities upon the beings they designate […]. And in relation to this first figure of envelopment, the narrator’s activity consists in explicating, that is, in unfolding, developing a content incommensurable with the container. The second figure is instead that of complication; this time it involves the coexistence of asymmetric and noncommunicating parts, either because they are organized as quite separate halves or because they are oriented as opposing ‘aspects’ or ways or because they begin to revolve, to whirl like a lottery wheel […]. The narrator’s activity then consists in electing, in choosing; at least this is his apparent activity, for many various forces, themselves complicated within him, are at work to determine his pseudo-will, to make him select a certain part of the complex composition, a certain aspect of the unstable opposition, a certain prize in the circling shadows” (p.116–117). This complicatio made of individuation, confusion or alteration is not limited to the field of love, but also fully applies to other worlds whose detailed phenomenology would take too much space here: the society, groups that migrate to other groups and form alterable series (the Villeparisis salon, the Verdurins, the Guermantes, the contagion or alternation of collective manias: Dreyfusism or anti-Dreyfusism, nationalism, melomania), etc. And it also appears in nature: Balbec emerges against the background of Breton and Norman names; the two côtés have multiple attributes, and share a transversal road puts them in communication, annulling their haecceity. 5

Metamorphoses and Migrations

But let’s stick with the characters. Bernard Brun noted that the character is not an individual, but rather a bundle of changeable qualities. We can develop this consideration by following two paths. The first concerns the literary life of the

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character, and that is: why is it that despite the variation of qualities we can still recognize relatively formed and constant individuals as their stable containers? The second is rather focused on a logic of qualities, that is to say: even the qualities that migrate from one character to another and are redistributed in the differentiation of the nebula are finite in number, and lend themselves to being enumerated and classified. The dialectic between characters and qualities seems to contain a keystone useful to understand both Proust’s way of working, and the psychological cores that inspired him and are reflected in the literary system of the Search. Finally, it can also help us understand certain aspects of the aesthetic and epistemological perspective presented by the novel. Let’s start with the first point, i.e. the autonomy of literary lives. On the one hand, it is true that the characters compose series that tend to transform them into stereotypes, into incarnations of an abstract ideal (it is one of the most evident effects of Proust’s Platonism). On the other hand, the unpublished works testify to a sort of autonomous—and now private—life of the characters, who present determinations consistent with their nature as we know it from the Search, which will be dropped in the passage from the Cahiers to the novel. Next to the vision of the character as an abstract type, another (not strictly alternative) one is outlined in which the psychological archetype and the gnoseological stereotype have a personal autonomy, a secret history. Let’s take an example. In the novel, the disinformation of the Combray society about Swann’s situation corresponds to a certain ignorance of the reader, who knows very little about his past—while being much more updated about his worldly acquaintances than people in Combray. Now, the brouillons are much more detailed about “young Swann”’s family. First of all, we learn about the existence of a Mme. Swann, not Odette (who will spoil Swann’s situation because of her male friendships), but Swann’s mother (who will favor the rise of her son thanks to her female friendships in the aristocracy). The veil that hides Swann’s past in the Search is partly lifted here, we learn of a studious youth and a useful and diplomatic mother. The problem of Jewishness and social integration is subjected to micrological analyzes that are very attenuated in the novel. Swann’s psychology and the sociology of Jewishness are the cores of a path that Proust will eventually abandon. As for psychology, Swann certainly embodies an ideal: he is the one to whom the Narrator would have liked to resemble the most. And therefore he is at least in part a projection, but still he is not devoid of specific attributes: his qualities may change, but only within the scope of coherent substitutions. Thus, in the Cahiers Swann deals with botany; in the novel, on the other hand, he is a painting expert who enjoys recognizing ancient paintings in the profiles of his

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c­ ontemporaries. These qualities do not alternate randomly, but undergo a regulated metamorphosis: the botanical taste is transferred to the Narrator (the hawthorns, Albertine’s floweriness, the wasp and the orchid in the JupienCharlus meeting); but Swann’s classifying passion is not canceled, but only shifted—it undergoes a disciplinary change, from botany to the history of art. The distribution of qualities takes place methodically, and respects the essential nature of the characters, in a process that is very laborious: in the unpublished works, Proust hesitates on the respective qualities of Swann and the Narrator. In the novel the latter is a botanist and Swann a painting expert, whereas in the Cahiers the Narrator compares the beloved women with paintings by the Dutch masters. This is no a simple translation, but rather a chiasm that manifests a certain specularity of the characters, but also their autonomy: what is taken from Swann and passes to the Narrator, must be restored in another form. Moreover, the translation leaves more than a trace in the novel: who, if not a botanist, could choose an expression like “to do a cattleya”? It seems legitimate to see a trace of M.me Swann mère even in the novel’s Mme. Standish (a hapax). But why do these anecdotes disappear in the passage from the brouillons to the Search? On this point, more than Swann’s psychology, we should resort to the sociology of Jewishness. The suppressed chapter was inscribed in a larger Judaic novel that would eventually fall under censorship: being a mobile and sociologically irregular race, the Jews—as we read about Swann’s mother—have recently landed from the East, and are not yet fixed in a caste organization like the rest of French society; they can therefore take a leap towards Faubourg, which would be unthinkable for the bourgeois of Combray. Israel dissolves the castes of the Hindu hierarchy and those of modern France. But this is precisely the reason for a social resentment that results in the segregation of the Jews, who are struck by marginalization just like homosexuals. This social homology is what Proust wants to conceal by suppressing the Judaic novel. There is no explicit thematization in the Search, but only hinted analogies: Jews and homosexuals have a higher sensitivity, Swann participates in the Guermantes spirit, and Charlus has a taste for art that is anything but conventional, and unthinkable in his relatives; this sensitivity, however, causes symmetrical misfortunes—Swann is expelled from the Faubourg, Charlus is insulted by Morel. The transition from the brouillons to the novel therefore involves the repression of the bond between Sodom and Israel in a single cursed race. Such a bond is too revealing on a personal level: therefore the Jewish novel is dropped, while the homosexual one is called to summarize all the determinations of the social interdiction—it abandons sociology to become a mythology. (Deleuze underlines this absolute character of homosexuality, as a symbol of the

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­ egative and of the universal alteration that threatens every heterosexual love n and every social convention). Homosexuality becomes a cosmological and gnoseological category, while what remains of Jewishness is gossip or slander: Swann’s Jewish life is attenuated, and the Jew becomes a figure from a Christian farce (see Charlus’ inferences), or from a Witz about Jews (Misses Bloch, Nissim Bernard). This censorship marks important transformations in the economy of the novel. The passage from the brouillons to the novel entails a repression, but already in the Cahiers homosexuality is subject to a primal repression which precedes the writing. Both in the brouillons and in the novel, the Narrator experiences only the negative effects of homosexuality: Albertine’s escape, Charlus’ scenes; he is never directly homosexual, and Sodom appears only as a slip of the tongue—see the anecdote of the waitress of the Baroness of Putbus, in which, under the femme de chambre, a “he” appears. Charlus is the eminent, though not exclusive, incarnation of a displacement due to a primal repression: from the beginning he is a mask of something that cannot be written, not even in private notebooks. There is no lack of other shifts, less charged with guilt, which are therefore widely attested up to very advanced phases of the brouillons. This is the case with the oscillations between the Narrator and Swann, once avoided the possible collusion between the latter and Charlus. Qualities change (botany, history of art), but also love objects. On this point, the unpublished works are even more explicit than the novel, which is already very eloquent; there is a real pendular motion between Swann and the Narrator about the “little band”. Very often the first (not the second) is the male protagonist both of the jeunes filles story and of the uncertain choice of individuality within the nebula. Certain narrative fragments attributed to Swann literally reappear in the novel in relation to the Narrator; the story is not compromising, and Proust can afford to hesitate for a long time between the first and the third person. For Swann, as for Charlus, Saint-Loup, and for the same Narrator, the movements follow a distributive logic, so that affective blocks, guilt feelings and the author’s qualities are divided among different characters, so as to discourage hasty identifications, but also to accentuate the demonstrative value of individual archetypes. The characters are therefore, at the same time, projections resulting from a distributive logic, didactic archetypes, and highly stylized and autonomous literary figures. Hence the dialectic between mobile qualities and relatively stable personalities presented by the unpublished works. Proust’s Platonism has many causes, and follows intertwining paths: exemplary figures (think also of the representatives of various professions like doctors or diplomats; or artistic ideals) are charged with narrative functions that make them

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autonomous—the archetype is not a stereotype. But abstract figures and concrete literary determinations coexist with a third element: Proust’s biography and the logic of its distribution, which interacts with narrative and demonstrative needs through censorships, displacements, and condensations. It is so in the case of Swann and in that of Charlus, seen as projections of the writer’s self, but also in that of the elaboration of Proust’s family register. Here there are several changes between unpublished works and novel: the brother disappears, kinship relationships are altered several times, the father figure is split in two (Adrien Proust, a doctor, reappears in the many representatives of the profession in the Search, but the fictional father is characterized as a ministerial official, and is also connected to Norpois by his bad literary taste, his inability to understand art, and his sure philistinism). Long attested in the unpublished works is the oscillation between mother and grandmother that, unlike what happens in the case of Swann-jeunes filles, resolves itself in the most indirect choice: in the oscillation between mother and grandmother, the latter prevails. This indecision, for example, is literally attested in a passage from Cahier 28, in a spectral and very emotionally charged context, which sees the alternation of the two figures, in the same function, on the same page. The oedipal conflict is pushed back by a generation, but it does not cease to have literary and profanatory efficacy; the network is complex and there are multiple shifts born of a single repression: the direct desecration of the maternal image, maintaining the oedipal tone of the anecdote, is transferred to the story of Vinteuil’s daughter who profanates the image of her father; the Narrator spies on her, as he will spy on the encounter between Charlus and Jupien, and—again—on the baron in Jupien’s brothel; and the Narrator explains with a Baudelairian frisson that he contributed to furnishing the place with furniture inherited from his grandmother. Other shifts seem less systematic, and cannot be justified in an autobiographical key. The repression is very generic, at least at first sight. In the unpublished works, Proust is much more explicit about the Narrator’s love affairs, which the Search describes in a veiled form. In the novel, there are only anodyne traces, missed encounters with Mme. Stermaria and with the baronne de Putbus’ femme de chambre, or the little girl who, after Albertine’s escape, the Narrator brings home and sits on his lap, which could have caused him a lawsuit. The comparison with the unpublished works is a passage from the trace to the anecdote: the femme de chambre, for example, which in the Search represents only a missed opportunity, in the Cahiers is instead a very characterized person, with whom the Narrator has a rather complex relationship. We are therefore dealing with an almost total repression.

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In other cases, the removal of the character is absolute, but their qualities, sensible characteristic and narrative details survive, and reappear in anodyne contexts. Such is the fate of the girl with the red rose attested in the Cahiers. Of the girl there is no longer any direct trace in the novel, but certain details migrate to other situations. For example, the Narrator understands that the girl is interested because she is looking at him, and above all because she touches him with her breast—touching is an indication of complicity that Dr. Cottard will point out to the Narrator in the dance scene between Albertine and Andrée at the casino. But one should also read the words with which, in Cahier 36, the Narrator describes his love for the girl of the red rose (“I felt in me a life greater than death”; “I only existed for that girl, my life could not fail, and fall into nothingness, because the law of attraction was reversed, I did not depend on the gravity of earthly things, I was only attracted by her”): they are the same words with which, in Time Regained, he will characterize his literary vocation, the greatness of aesthetic discoveries and the fear of not being able to live long enough to write them. A literary context incorporates impressions that originally referred to a sensible context. 6

Fragments and Contexts

What is most interesting, in these as well as in other cases, is not the object of the censorship, but the kind of displacement that results from it. In this sense, the literal, and aesthetically justified, transposition of sentences linked to a sensible experience into another context seems much more dense and significant than a predictable censorship. Fragments or anecdotes are transferred into completely “heterodox” contexts, without in principle proving which space is the most adequate: sensitivity or intellect? Bal or novel? How can we decide to whom the discourse on immortality belongs by right? To the girl with the red flower in the unpublished works, or to the aesthetic justification of the book to come? Choosing the latter means emphasizing the definitive text, but siding with the girl certainly means asserting another prejudice, the one according to which sensitivity would be more natural than intelligence (and therefore the unpublished works would be more sincere than the final text). If the determination of the appropriate context is essentially undecidable, it is also, ultimately, secondary to the narrative and interpretative possibilities opened up by this intertwining of people, affections, and contexts. Another example: we all remember how in the novel the Narrator’s grandfather is singing opera arias when Swann asks for letters of introduction to certain families

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(the grandfather suspects Swann of having affairs with cooks and housemaids in the houses in which he wants to be introduced). In the brouillons, these opera arias reappear literally, but in a heterogeneous context: they constitute an anecdote of the censored Jewish novel. With those arias, the infallible instinct of the grandfather (or of the great-uncle: Proust fluctuates on this point) makes it clear that he noticed the Jewish origin of the schoolmates whom the ­Narrator invited to lunch. A censored affection, namely Jewishness, is transposed into another affection, seduction, and into a changed context whose protagonist, Swann, has been previously purged of excessive Jewish connotations. This is a multiple shift whose psychological implications are obvious. But let’s take another example, which seems to summarize all the possibilities offered by the cases examined so far. In the novel, Albertine and Oriane have a predominant weight in the economics of the Narrator’s affections, while Mme. Stermaria is a sporadic dream and a missed encounter. Now, in Cahier 12 Proust describes a certain M.lle de Quimperlé seen at Balbec. Among the various qualities of the woman, there is a hoarse inflection of the voice, which gives rise to feudal and geographical fantasies in the Narrator. In the novel, the detail of the hoarse voice reappears in Oriane, and this lead is confirmed by the fact that, in the brouillon, we learn that the mother of M.lle. Quimperlé was the countess of Guermantes, and that the girl was called Viviane. Is this an easily removable disguise, so that behind Quimperlé we must read Guermantes, and behind Viviane Oriane? So that the only difference is the context of the seaside as opposed to Paris? Not necessarily. Quimperlé also evokes Brittany, the dunes, and the small nobility of the province in the Narrator; and Quimperlé will be called shortly after Kermaria, and then Stermaria. Furthermore, the figure of the Cahier corresponds to the Stermaria of the novel in several respects: the Breton reveries are precisely what pushed the Narrator to leaf through the Country House Year Book to fantasize about the place where Stermaria lives, and then to ask her to meet him—which she won’t—at the Bois. The context does not appear eccentric in this perspective; rather, what seems to be anodyne is the Oriane determination, with all that it entails (high nobility, Faubourg, “Guermantes spirit”, etc.). But Viviane and Oriane do have a common quality. Their point of intersection is an impersonal affection: the hoarse voice and the sensations it arouses. It is a very abstract concrete quality, which opens up an even more complicated drift. Because the hoarse voice is not only Oriane or Viviane, but also Maria, one of the jeunes filles of the initial project. On the one hand, the transition takes place on common bases that are more than the sensible quality; Oriane reappears in Viviane, but the latter, as Ster-maria, leads to Maria (the seaside and Breton context is common to both Stermaria and Maria). But the latter is also one of Albertine’s masks, and shares many of her anecdotes—for ­example,

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the Narrator chooses her among the jeunes filles, but tries to make her suffer by showing that he prefers Septimie, just as, in the Search, he will make her jealous with Andrée, etc. The nebula is further complicated. Maria is the head of a chain of associations that, following the thread of a hoarse voice, from Oriane leads us to ­Stermaria and Albertine. But as a jeune fille, she is also the end of another complicatio: there is the above-mentioned oscillation between Swann and the Narrator about the story of the jeunes filles; on the other hand, the Narrator loves Maria in the manner of Swann, comparing her to a painting by Rembrandt. Both in this and in the previous examples, we see a complication of chains and groups, which are based on a few impersonal affects—a hoarse voice, being a “fugitive”, Jewishness, homosexuality, botany, pictorial analogies. 7 Affections This intersection of chains is not so helpful in establishing an appropriate context for the single cahiers. Rather, turning the perspective upside down, it’s better to recognize the Search as an unstable system of which the novel is only one possible determination. A certain quality distinguishes a given character, but then moves on to others, who in turn show new qualities, opening up further possible worlds. The process of complication and explanation is what animates the genesis of the text. As we have seen, Deleuze sees the explicit theodicy of the novel and its declared poetics and gnoseology as the pulsation of a nebula, which unfolds only to complicate itself, contracting or opening up other universes. In the Cahiers, the hoarse voice or the fugitives are recurrent affections in heterogeneous contexts, they are identified only to fall in the indistinction of a group; but is not the extreme point of the narrator’s apprenticeship an experience of universal alteration? The apprentissage teaches him that the qualities attributed to people and countries by fantasy diverge from reality, but at its peak it also teaches him that all the determinations brought about by experience are mixed up in a lottery of faces, names, and coats of arms; and that the tinkling of a teaspoon against a teacup can resurrect a vanished world and, following the thread of a sensible quality abstracted from its context, it can turn out to be identical to Swann’s ringing at the front door, forty years earlier. A universe becomes more complicated, the living room of the Guermantes matinée loses its contours, but another universe, fortuitous and inevitable, unfolds. Genesis of the text, functioning of the novel, ideology and gnoseology professed by Proust: in each of these levels the dialectic between complication and explanation is repeated. Individuals and affects intersect by establishing a

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universe of possible narratives, of which the Search is an actualization. The unpublished works help us see the Search as a puzzle whose pieces can be arranged in many ways according to a very dense plot: the characters have an individuality and therefore personal qualities; but those determinations are already, in the text and in its antecedents, relations, therefore alterations: they create series, they open up onto different groups and nebulae, they erase the identity that they define. Take Swann and Charlus. The affections and the qualities that make them people are also what makes them serializable, disclosing new universes: the Jewish or homosexual curse, that is, their belonging to a race or a band; the “spirit” of the Guermantes group; the pursuit of a loved one who hides in other bands, the Verdurins or the army; the name Charles, that is, the archetype of betrayed good faith, Charles Bovary, in a potential literary constellation. But those indistinct qualities and groups are also what unites Swann and Charlus to the Narrator (the escape, Guermantes, Combray, the jeunes filles). Wherever individuality is found, there are also qualities that dissolve it, and nebulae in which it is swallowed. A character creates a series, but is in turn implicated in another; they choose the loved one in a group, but lose them because of the prejudices of their own. Conversely, each impersonal quality draws up a complex network of relationships that unites different worlds, characters, groups, series. The gaze as a promesse de bonheur is an obsession of the Narrator, and links Gilberte in Combray to Albertine in Balbec, to M.lle de Quimperlé, to the girl of the red rose; but it is also the gaze of the Narrator who spies on the little band, M.lle Vinteuil in Montjouvain, Charlus and Jupien. The hoarse voice unites Oriane, Albertine, Stermaria, indicating a possible narrative that has not been followed, tracing a virtual series. And the girl with the red rose has qualities that reappear in unexpected contexts, but in turn is part of a botanical series, opening up a plant world—Albertine’s desire to look like a flower, the wasp and the orchid, the cattleya and the hawthorns. And there is also much to say about the zoological chain of the wolf (loup), or of birds (Rue de l’Oiseau, the ornithological hats of the Faubourg, the stupid involuntary prophet birds, what Céleste Albaret says about the Narrator: « Regarde, Marie, est-ce qu’on ne dirait pas qu’il se fisse ses plumes, et tourne son cou, avec une souplesse! il a l’air tout léger, on dirait qu’il est en train d’apprendre à voler »). Determination and universal alteration: this is the basis Proust’s poetics. In the qualities and in the people who embody them by holding secret analogies between narrative contexts, social environments, geographical areas, there is a continuous pulsation. The classification of narrative structures or simple forms is impossible—as is the analysis of all the drifts and intersections between

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qualities and characters. Every character is the intersection of social groups or marginalized races, of historical or pictorial, botanical and zoological, onomastic, heraldic, etymological universes. As an encyclopedia or a spider web, the Search forms with its Cahiers an unstable system. How many volumes of the Search would there be if Proust had not died in 1922? That question is destined to remain open. 8

Bibliographical Note

These pages take up the Proustian readings of Gianfranco Contini and Gilles Deleuze. From Contini I have taken the considerations on Proust’s style and on the peculiarity of the “unpublished works” (cf. « Introduzione alle paperoles e Jean Santeuil, ossia l’infanzia della Recherche », now in Varianti e altra linguistica, Einaudi, Torino 1970, 19792). Even in a less specific context, Contini’s reflection on the problem of variants provides a broad perspective to frame the question of Proust’s unpublished works and variants: the final words of the essay on Petrarca’s corrections (Ibid., see pp. 30–31) also fit well with the Proustian Cahiers: “If the discourse on corrections remains so fragmented and torn, if the same critical discourse not only remains, but in a certain respect it is destined to remain, open, it is because the Triumphs are a game about infinity, an unanswered question which, beyond Petrarca’s exhaustion, continues to demand its integration into the expanse of time”. It is in this perspective that I have insisted on the «  possibilizing  » character of the unpublished works, which make the text of the Search unstable instead of ratifying it with genetic arguments (on this point, Contini’s overall framework is integrated with the question of Gerard Genette on what the Search would look like if Proust had not died relatively young; cf. « La question de l’écriture », in AA.VV., Recherche de Proust, Seuil, Paris 1980). From Gilles Deleuze instead I have drawn an overall image of the dynamics of the novel, which Deleuze refers to the definitive text of the Search, but which I believe works just as well for a comparison between the novel and the unpublished works, between poetics and genetics—see the notions of “nebula”, “series”, “group”, “complication” and “explanation”, of which I tried to emphasize the full operativity in the Cahiers. These concepts are systematically developed in the monograph Proust et les signes, puf, Paris 1979 (the English translation comes from Proust and Signs, Continuum, London, 2008); other references to Proust—in particular, the analysis of the figure of Albertine—can be found in other works by Deleuze, and especially in L’Anti-Oedipe (Ed. de Minuit, Paris 1972) and Mille Plateaux (Ed. de Minuit, Paris 1980, p. 337 ff, the

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English translation comes from A Thousand Plateaus, Continuum, London, 2004). A third source of arguments, of a “methodological” type, was the French and American literature on deconstruction. This perspective has helped with two issues: 1. how to establish the specific context of a fragment within a literary system of which we do not have a definitive hermeneutical key; 2. how to avoid forcing extrinsic interpretations (for example psychoanalysis), trying to let the rhetorical and expressive mechanisms in the text speak for themselves. For the first point, see in particular J. Derrida, « Signature Événement Contexte », in Marges de la philosophie, Ed. de Minuit, Paris 1972; for the second, see P. de Man, « Reading (Proust) », in Allegories of Reading, Yale U.P., New Haven and London 1979. The paragraph dedicated to the problem of names starts from a discussion of the well-known—and certainly overrated—article by R. Barthes, « Proust et les noms » (now in Nouveaux Essais Critiques, Seuil, Paris 1972), and resorts in particular to the textual observations by Eugène Nicole («  Genèse onomastique du texte proustien », in Etudes Proustiennes, V, Gallimard, Paris 1984); the Proust-Flaubert literary constellation alluded to in the same paragraph, and then in the final one, is a common belief of critics, authorized by Proust’s own statements, and punctually analyzed with regard to the name ‘Charles’ (SwannCharlus-Charlie, and Charles Bovary) by Bernard Brun in L’età dei nomi, cit. For a more general approach, see also G. Genette, « Flaubert par Proust », in L’Arc, n. 79, 1980.

Bal de têtes: bête, bêtise and Identity 1

The Guermantes Matinée

After a few years of worldly segregation, the Narrator accepts an invitation to the matinée thrown by Princess Guermantes, formerly M.me Verdurin and then Duchess of Durazzo. The change of identity of the duchess, under a single coat of arms, is not the only transformation of names, identities and places that the Narrator is about to experience at that memorable party. Along the way, we learn that the hotel de Guermantes is no longer what it once was, as the prince sold his old palace to an American billionaire, and built another one on the avenue du Bois. At the Champs Elysées, the Narrator meets Charlus recovering from a stroke. The infirmity caused him to lose understanding of worldly hierarchies, so the Baron ceremoniously greets people who once he would have pretended not to know—probably now he doesn’t really know them anymore, and has forgotten their identity. On the other hand, Charlus has become extraordinarily sincere with respect to his own identity: his apoplexy leads him to reveal secrets he had sought to hide for his whole life. On m’a raconté qu’à cette époque-là il était en proie presque chaque jour à des crises de dépression mentale, caractérisée non pas positivement par de la divagation, mais par la confession à haute voix, devant des tiers dont il oubliait la présence ou la sévérité, d’opinions qu’il avait l’habitude de cacher, sa germanophilie par exemple. Si longtemps après la guerre, il gémissait de la défaite des Allemands, parmi lesquels il se comptait et disait orgueilleusement: « Et pourtant il ne se peut pas que nous ne prenions pas notre revanche, car nous avons prouvé que c’est nous qui étions capables de la plus grande résistance et qui avions la meilleure organisation. » What is left of the baron’s identity, now that he no longer recognizes the identities of others? A strange involuntary and bête sincerity: already on other occasions Charlus had been very explicit about his political and sexual tastes, he had already spoken with great frankness about the virtues of the Germans, and he had never made any secret of having sought “beauty in all its forms”, but he did so to hide his Germanophilia and inversion. Now instead, transformed by time into a blind and crazy King Lear, Charlus reveals his own identity, which fully contradicts the one he had happily put on in public for many years: he is not a man of the world, but a madman, he is not a Don Juan, but a homosexual,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004431232_004

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he is not a French aristocrat but a German nationalist. He has changed social status, sexual orientation, and even nationality. This complete metamorphosis, together with the change of identity of the princess of Guermantes and the relocation of the prince, foreshadows the alterations that the Narrator will witness a little later in the hotel de Guermantes. « Chacun semblait s’être ‘fait une tête’ ».1 And it is also the first impression given by the princely salon. Identities, transformed by time, appear as theater characters: Charlus received Lear’s Shakespearean majesty, but Bloch looks rather like an old Shylock; the prince always seemed like a king worthy of an operetta, but at the party he even loaded his makeup with a white beard; Argencourt has lost his aplomb and looks like a caricature of himself; the Marquise d’Arpajon, who once played the part of a jeune fille, now has the role of the fat matron, awaiting the final performance « en vieille branlante et courbée ». Every identity appears as « un des masques du Temps » forced onto a person’s face; the durée that marks the persistence of beings is also what dissolves their physiognomy and individuality, their physical aspect and moral qualities or flaws (thus, a « vieux moine » that the Narrator encounters at that matinée is nothing but the transformation worthy of Fregoli of a “noir viveur” he had known in his youth, and in fact, we are wrong to believe that the old are always good old men: the youthful evil was simply covered up by the makeup of time). The first form of alteration is therefore the theater; but the masks hide something deeper and more disturbing, a face that is no longer human. This is the most sincere unmasking: a regression to the animal and the inorganic. J’avais l’impression de regarder derrière le vitrage instructif d’un muséum d’histoire naturelle.2 Je m’appliquais à introduire dans le visage de l’inconnue, entièrement inconnue, l’idée qu’elle était M.me Sazerat, et je finissais par rétablir le sens autrefois connu de ce visage, mais qui serait resté vraiment aliéné pour moi, entièrement celui d’une autre personne ayant perdu tous les attributs humains que j’avais connus, qu’un homme redevenu singe, si le nom et l’affirmation de l’identité ne m’avaient mis […] sur la voie de la solution.3 1 iii, 920, Time Regained: « At the first moment I did not understand why I failed to recognise the master of the house and his guests, why they all appeared to have “made a head” ». 2 iii, 923: « I had the impression of observing through the glass of a showcase in a natural history museum ». 3 iii, 931: « I applied myself to introducing into the face of a woman entirely unknown to me the idea that she was Mme. Sazerat. And I ended by establishing my former notion of this face which would have remained utterly unknown to me, entirely that of another woman, as

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Proust’s theory of identity culminates in the bête humaine and in elective affinities: the reasons for a given behavior, for hatred or love, the reasons for the alterations that disfigure the faces and souls of the guests, sink into an automatism and a degradation that have nothing human about them: Bloch walks into the living room leaping like a hyena, the Duchess of Guermantes has the body of a salmon or a sacred fish, Odette could be the highlight of a plant exhibition, and her challenge to the laws of time is more surprising than the challenge of radium to the laws of nature. « Des poupées baignant dans les couleurs immatériels des années »: both theater and museum of theatre history, the Hôtel de Guermantes is also a scientific exhibition or a Lépine museum; Bloch carries a monocle whose mechanical appearance dispenses the old Narrator’s schoolmate from « tous ces devoirs difficiles auxquels la nature humaine est soumise », while another guest is so different from what he used to look like that his voice seems to come from a gramophone. It would be wrong to see this universal alteration as simply negative, a depression and a disillusion that contradict the Narrator’s youthful beliefs about unique and founded existences and identities, to which he reacts with artistic creation, with a novel destined to regain lost time. Rather, these metamorphoses are the deep substance of time: they are precisely what allows us to find it again. The bal de têtes is the culmination of a psychology and an anthropology that see identities as transitory identifications that are in fact the reflection of social conventions, personal imaginations, racial prejudices, series, groups and nations, at the bottom of which is a bêtise, an animal becoming which is the more true the more it is involuntary, unreflected, organic and not psychological or intellectual. Proust’s perspectivism about the permanence and consistency of identities is not reduced to a relativism linked to the progressive modifications of our personality, which lead us to judge others differently. The emphasis on the cognitive value and the scope of truth of the involuntary, which runs through the whole Search, involves a theory of the variation of personality that has little to do with the vicissitudes of a subject, and, ultimately with those of a human nature: what a subject is certainly results from the opinions and forgetfulness of their community, be it the environment of Combray, that of the Grand-Hôtel de Balbec, the Verdurins or the Faubourg; but those opinions or those memories, as well as the becoming of the single characters, are animated by an impetus that, precisely because it is involuntary, has little to do with humanity. The bête humaine seems to be the most sincere motive of it had lost as fully the human attributes I had known as though it were that of a man changed into a monkey, were it not that the name and the statement of her identity put me in the way of solving the problem ».

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a subject’s evolutions, just as the definitive truths, in life and in art, do not come from intelligence, but from the involuntary and the bêtise: Les êtres les plus bêtes, par leurs gestes, leurs propos, leurs sentiments involontairement exprimés, manifestent des lois qu’ils ne perçoivent pas, mais que l’artiste surprend en eux. A cause de ce genre d’observations, le vulgaire croit, l’écrivain méchant, et il le croit à tort, car dans un ridicule l’artiste voit une belle généralité, il ne l’impute pas plus à grief à la personne observée que le chirurgien ne la mésestimerait d’être affectée d’un trouble assez fréquent de la circulation; aussi se moquet-il moins que personne des ridicules.4 2

Personality and Seriality

Les précieuses ridicules. It would be worthwhile to go back to the literary antecedents of this theory of identity and artistic creation (Balzac, perhaps Poe, certainly Baudelaire). However, here I would rather try to find, in the Search, the narrative premises and the internal literary theodicy that justify the universal alteration of the bal de têtes. The quotation I have just interrupted goes on to claim that the artist « est plus malheureux qu’il n’est méchant; quand il s’agit de ses propres passions, tout en connaissant aussi bien la généralité, il s’affranchit moins aisément des souffrances personnelles qu’elles causent ».5 In terms of the theory of literature, this passage presents itself as a profession of aesthetic Aristotelianism against the scarce truth value of popular, realistic and patriotic art: knowing means mimicking a universal of human action, therefore a series of general automatisms and repetitions, and not following the very few instructive details given by the individual. Realistic art is less scientific and popular than Bergotte’s books both because it is wrong in choosing its readers (electricians are normally better educated than dukes), and because there can be no knowledge of the particular, but only of the general—it is necessary 4 iii, 901: « The stupidest people unconsciously express their feelings by their gestures and their remarks and thus demonstrate laws they are unaware of which the artist brings to light. On account of this, the vulgar wrongly believe the writer to be mischievous for the artist sees an engaging generality in an absurd individual and no more imputes blame to him than a surgeon despises his patient for being affected with a chronic ailment of the circulation. Moreover, no one is less inclined to scoff at absurd people than the artist. ». 5 iii, 901: « Unfortunately he is more unhappy than mischievous where his own passions are concerned; though he recognises their generality just as much in his own case, he escapes personal suffering less easily. ».

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to know how to grasp relationships, recursion, rapports. Therefore the maniacal micrology of the Goncourt makes it so that environments that he has frequented for years, like the Verdurin tribe, are now unrecognizable to the Narrator (inversely, there is no point in explaining successful literary works through the biography of their authors, as does Sainte-Beuve). In terms of a theory of identity, the involuntary and the general that it produces lead us towards a dialectic between individual and series. The Narrator has a constitutive tendency to serialize, to classify individuals and love them on the basis of recurring characteristics. A typical case of this attitude is found right in the bal de têtes. The Narrator, who has not made peace with the idea of being rather old, meets a young aristocrat whom he knows indirectly, and who has embraced a military career; he concludes that he could introduce him to military affairs, as Saint-Loup had done. It is easy to see that Saint-Loup was not an irreplaceable friend, but a recurring function whose main value consisted in his competence in strategic matters. This is indeed rather blatant: Gilberte, met a few pages later (and who, for an insurgent atavism, resembles her mother Odette) entertains the Narrator on the theme of Saint-Loup’s foresight in matters of the art of war. Individuals consist of skills, qualities, traits that are peculiar but iterable in others, and series are formed that dissolve the individuality of those we have known. Most of all, love consists in grasping an essence in an object that is its unaware and inert carrier, causing the search for that essence in different beings that the love ideology proclaims to be unique instead. Repeating, making series: as said, the hero may try to convince himself that Gilberte, Oriane and Albertine are unrepeatable individuals for him, endowed with qualities that cannot be replaced; the fact remains that every love story repeats the one that preceded it, as a slightly altered stereotype of an abstract archetype (that of the beloved as an être de fuite, from the mother to Gilberte, to Albertine, etc.). However, this recursiveness does not only concern the identity of the other. Indeed, it is fully implemented also in relation to the Narrator, so that we can see a “male series” next to the female one; the seriality of the figures of the Narrator, Swann, Charlus, and Saint-Loup can be easily understood due to the similarity of their qualities, weaknesses and events. A network of functions is traced, so that universal passions emerge behind the identified characters and individual events. Scholars have often—rightly—spoken of Proust’s Platonism, but the search for generality as a cognitive justification of art, in the Search, seems rather Aristotelian: in Swann, in the Narrator, in Saint-Loup, in Charlus, Proust creates a series that favors a distributive logic (sharing guilt feelings and qualities through secondary variations: Jewishness, homosexuality, sadism, ­interests in art or war). But on the other hand, the distributive logic responds

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to a more profound demonstrative need—to create general types that complement each other and that become depersonalised through a serial recursion. And it would be wrong to see these simulacra only as signs of the distributive aspect, the cryptographic fragmentation of a founded and formed identity; the other is not just projective, but also an instance; in the series, there is no beginning or end, every link in the male chain—the Narrator, Swann, Charlus and Saint-Loup—is at the same time the projection of a subject, and the instance or invention of that same subject. The invention of the other should be understood in the subjective, but above all in the objective, meaning of the genitive: it is the other that invents the same, the subject. Seriality is therefore that which empties the identity of the other (feminine series) and of the same (masculine series), but it is also what continually restarts both series, the condition of an incessant repetition of the chain of repetitions that weaves the novel—but which also establishes the identity of the Narrator: La matière de mon expérience, laquelle serait la matière de mon livre, me venait de Swann, non pas seulement par ce qui le concernait lui-même et Gilberte; mais c’était lui qui m’avait dès Combray donné le désir d’aller à Balbec, où sans cela mes parents n’eussent jamais eu l’idée de m’envoyer, et sans quoi je n’aurais pas connu Albertine […] mais même les Guermantes, puisque ma grand’mère n’eût pas retrouvé M.me de Villeparisis, moi fait la connaissance de Saint-Loup et de M. de Charlus, ce qui m’avait fait connaître la duchesse de Guermantes et par elle sa cousine, de sorte que ma présence même en ce moment chez le prince de Guermantes, où venait de me venir brusquement l’idée de mon oeuvre (ce qui faisait que je devais à Swann non seulement la matière mais la décision), me venait aussi de Swann.6

6 iii, 915: « the matter of my experience came to me from Swann, not simply through what concerned himself and Gilberte. It was he who, ever since the Combray days, had given me the desire to go to Balbec, where, but for him, my parents would never have had the notion of sending me and but for which I should never have known Albertine. […] But without Swann I should not even have known the Guermantes, since my grandmother would not have rediscovered Mme. de Villeparisis, I should not have made the acquaintance of Saint-Loup and of M. de Charlus which in turn caused me to know the Duchesse de Guermantes and, through her, her cousin, so that my very presence at this moment at the Prince de Guermantes’ from which suddenly sprang the idea of my work (thus making me owe Swann not only the matter but the decision) also came to me from Swann ».

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Often, however—the Narrator continues—our life can spring from someone much inferior to Swann, even « l’être le plus médiocre », for example Albertine. The cooperation of the other disregards merits and culture, and reaffirms once more the primacy of the involuntary (« Il reste à savoir, selon le plan où nous vivons, si nous trouvons que telle trahison par laquelle nous a fait souffrir une femme est peu de chose auprès des vérités que cette trahison nous a découvertes et que la femme heureuse d’avoir fait souffrir n’aurait guère pu comprendre »).7 3

The Group and the Band

If therefore the series responds to a literary necessity (gnoseological value of art, demonstrative power of events and characters), we must not forget that, based on the assumptions of Proust’s aesthetic theodicy, the novel must rival philosophy; a literary position is therefore at the same time a philosophical stance: the presentation of the character as an abstract archetype and as a recurring stereotype is also an assumption relative to a theory of identity. Real identities, which are the cause and the stimulus of the literary ones, are not different from the latter: they are also mutable and serializable stereotypes. We can see this better by moving on to another operating principle of the Search that was clarified by Deleuze: the group. It is an impersonal, biological and sociological rather than narrative element. Every identity is serialized and inscribed in the series of a subject that elects the other; but the other is always a less-formed individuality than it appears: the other is always detached from a group, a clan or a band, in which it is not a person, but a point within a shapeless nebula. Note that the beginning of Swann is not dedicated to Odette’s characterization, but to an examination of the Verdünn ‘clan’; Gilberte’s first appearance occurs against the background of family rumors about Swann and his wife, and in the symbolic landscape of the côté of Méséglise; the Narrator falls in love with the coterie Guermantes in general before falling in love with Oriane; and think of course of the little band of jeunes filles. Perhaps more than the series, the group reveals Proust’s interest in those dark and collective aspects that determine an identity—peoples, nations, coteries, vices, atavisms. 7 iii, 907: « A woman we need makes us suffer, forces from us a series of sentiments, deeper and more vital than a superior type of man who interests us. It remains to be seen, according to the plane on which we live, whether we shall discover that the pain the infidelity of a woman has caused us is a trifle when compared with the truths thereby revealed to us, truths that the woman delighted at having made us suffer would hardly have grasped. ».

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Both for the lover and for the beloved, and generally in every relationship between one individual and another, both parties have very little freedom, and are above all the expression of the social and natural bands of which they are part; the group, and not the pseudo-will of individuals, decides choices and destinies a priori. A very obvious case is that of atavism. The Narrator’s interest in genealogies already speaks volumes about the interest in races and generations that runs through the Search. It is true that an individual, due to an opaque disposition, can belong to a different intellectual species than the one assigned to them by their social destiny—so certain dukes have a petty-bourgeois mentality, whereas tailors or maids (Jupien, Còleste Albaret) can reveal instead an aristocratic and literary sensitivity. But this seems to be a secondary law, subjected to a more general influence of atavism as a dark and pre-intellectual force. This is the case with Swann, who seems to fully embody the Guermantes spirit. Yet this is a transient identification: the Guermantes spirit is not identified with the princely family. After his death, Swann disappears forever (also because of his wife and daughter, who try to erase his memory), and it serves him no purpose to have personified the Guermantes spirit; the house instead survives thanks to an atavistic force—blood, genealogy, coat of arms, the crowned “G” on coffins and tombs, dominating the individuality of the dead Guermantes and inscribing it in the generality of the lineage. What appears instead in Swann, when Dreyfusism, marriage and illness make him lose interest in the Faubourg? A different kind of atavism: the Jewish one. And we understand that belonging to that “cursed race” was the source of his special sensitivity, of his social ascent as well as of his fall. It had been M.me Swann mère8 who laid the foundations of her son’s worldly success thanks to her female friendships in aristocratic circles; and her confidence, like her son’s, arose from the fact that, as a Jew, she had recently disembarked from the East and was not yet established in the caste system that organized the rest of society (for which a Christian bourgeois from Combray never imagined he could communicate with ducal coteries). But it is that same Jewishness that eventually marks the marginalization of Swann, who declares to support Dreyfus when the Guermantes have not yet changed their minds (the betrayal costs him dear. Kicked out from the house of the duke, Swann returns to his race of origin, the disease has accentuated his Semitic nose, and now he really looks like an old Jew). Atavism is a typical case of the inscription of individual identities in groups, bands and races that characterizes the whole of the Search. And on the basis of 8 Cf. the previous chapter.

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one or more groups one can explain many of the alterations that mark the bal de têtes: the princess of Guermantes betrays her old Verdurin identity precisely by invoking the constitution of the old group, of the clan or the bourgeois melomaniac tribe of the Verdurins, which we met at the beginning of the ­novel—« Oui, c’est cela, nous ferons clan! nous ferons clan! »9—and, from the warehouses of lost time, a very famous and ancient tribe returns into time, after seemingly disappearing (death of old Verdurin, migration of many other members—M.me Verdurin, Odette, Sky—in the Faubourg). Behind every identity there are races and lineages, which however do not constitute the point of origin of an individual, but rather, and from the beginning, their dissolution and alteration: the Faubourg and the Guermantes coteries are certainly a mystifying group, and in her princely demeanor the old Mme. Verdurin seems to have come out of a masquerade; but this certainly does not mean that, vice versa, the small Verdurin tribe and its Mistress were more stable elements—those were simply older lies. Atavism is precisely this: a more ancient—and already dissolutive—element of the subject, which is spread in a group from the beginning and transpires in new determinations. Behind the Princess of the time regained we find the Mistress of the lost time, behind Swann’s Guermantes spirit there is an old Jew. Reciprocally, beneath all the maquillages with which the individual Guermantes enrich their determinations, and seem to detach themselves from the generic concept of their lineage, it is the latter that eventually takes over, with an energy that the individual cannot resist. Let’s go back to the case of love affairs. We have seen how the loved one is not a formed and consistent individuality, but comes out of a nebula little by little. The identity of the loved one is then the result of a selection process activated by the lover, who extracts and determines the loved one against the background of a mediocre environment. Another effort consists in keeping the identity of the loved one intact, against the inertia that tends to bring them back into indistinctness, into the groups from which they were differentiated and to which they end up returning anyway (casino, conservatory, Verdurin clan). Individuation is a state of transitory captivation in which the lover imposes an identity on a loved one who continuously escapes it, so as to return to a group and to get lost in it. But even the lover’s election of the other is the outcome not of an individuality, but of a group; the beloved is chosen not on the basis of an individual’s will, but on the basis of a pseudo-will that manifests the collective tendency of a band and a lineage. Consider the Charlus-Charlie relationship: the baron detests the army, the conservatory or algebra, which aim to swallow Morel’s 9 iii, 894; Time Regained: « That’s it, we’ll form a group. ».

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i­dentity; but the latter is inevitably attracted by those groups, and this also helps him escape the persecution of the Guermantes tribe, of which Charlus is only a particular determination. Charlie is haunted by the baron’s mad jealousy, but what Charlus doesn’t know is that the legion of his rivals has mainly Guermantes men in its ranks. And for example Saint-Loup tries to forge a relationship with his uncle’s lover, precisely because the Guermantes lineage dominates the individuals that compose it, and imposes on them the same tastes, habits and atavisms. And so too, while the baron is crazed with jealousy, Morel is besieged by the Prince of Guermantes, who is driven by the same hereditary instinct. Invited by the prince to the Maineville brothel, Morel is warned that the baron knows everything, and that Charlus himself, and not the other Guermantes, will be watching him from the next room; Morel’s fear, then, is to be persecuted not by an individual, but by a whole lineage—«  c’était plutôt l’ombre de Morel, Morel embaumé, pas même Morel ressuscité comme Lazare, une apparition de Morel, un fantôme de Morel, Morel revenant ou évoqué dans cette chambre ».10 A few days later, the real catastrophe takes place. Hoping for greater discretion, the prince, who is undercover, invites Morel to a villa on the coast. The violinist comes to the appointment with the circumspection of the hunted prey, and feels safe only after crossing the threshold; the servant tells him to wait and goes to call Monsieur. Mais quand Morel se trouva seul et voulut regarder dans la glace si sa mèche n’etait pas dérangée, ce fut comme une hallucination. Sur la cheminée, les photographies, reconnaissables pour le violoniste, car il les avait vues chez M. de Charlus, de la princesse de Guermantes, de la duchesse de Luxembourg, de M.me de Villeparisis, le pétrifièrent d’abord d’effroi. ‘Au même moment il aperçut celle de M. de Charlus, laquelle était un peu en retrait. Le baron semblait immobiliser sur Morel un ­regard étrange et fixe.11

10 11

ii, 1080; Cities of the Plain: « it was rather the shade of Morel, Morel embalmed, not even Morel restored to life like Lazarus, an apparition of Morel, a phantom of Morel, Morel ‘walking’ or ‘called up’ in that room ». ii, 1081–1082: « But when Morel found himself alone, and went to the mirror to see that his forelock was not disarranged, he felt as though he were the victim of a hallucination. The photographs on the mantelpiece (which the violinist recognised, for he had seen them in M. de Charlus’s room) of the Princesse de Guermantes, the Duchesse de Luxembourg, Mme. de Villeparisis, left him at first petrified with fright. At the same moment he caught sight of the photograph of M. de Charlus, which was placed a little behind the rest. The Baron seemed to be concentrating upon Morel a strange, fixed glare ».

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Terrified, the violinist walks away without waiting for the prince, of whom he has not recognized the identity, but—which is more than enough—the lineage, through a parade of photographs no less terrible than the parade of masks that will be presented to the Narrator at the bal de têtes. The persecution of the group is such that it should not surprise us that Morel’s liberation from the imprisonment in which the baron keeps him takes place through the affiliation to another group, the Verdurin clan, in a scene in which one would be wrong to simply see Morel’s wickedness. The liberation of the violinist backed by the Verdurins is in fact inscribed in a context dominated, rather than by comparisons between people, by the clash between races and classes. Charlie insulting Charlus is the epitome (the psychic symptom and literary mise en abîme) of the battle that on that occasion, a musical evening at M.me Verdurin’s to which Charlus invited the whole Faubourg, is setting the aristocratic coterie of the Guermantes against the bourgeois clan of the Verdurins. So Charlie is backed by the small tribe, just as Charlus receives an unexpected help from the aristocracy: the queen of Naples takes the baron’s arm and escorts him to the exit, repeating the fight against the canaille in Gaeta, in 1861. Thus, in the group we have the intertwining of heterogeneous elements, ranging from biological atavism to the hysteria of culture, up to a comparison between classes and nations. Proust is certainly less introspective than a certain tradition and his own self-understanding may lead us to believe, because the place of a supposed interiority (soul, individual psychology) is simply the point of intersection of the biological and sociological currents and nuclei that dominate it. The serial nature of love affairs and the group logic that they implement are only the particular cases of a process of general alteration of the individual consistency of which there are many examples on other levels: military alliances, or the diplomatic agreements and their reversal cited by Norpois, which present us with the image of unstable and contradictory nations and peoples; the cursed races—Israel, Sodom, Gomorrah—their sociological determinations and their powerful action on individuals; groups that migrate to other groups, form new gangs and make alliances that are always readily undone (the fusion between Verdurins and Guermantes, the alternation of collective manias like Wagner, Debussy or Dreyfus, the patriotic writers or Bergotte); geographical sites, as unstable as groups and nations (the emergence of Balbec against the background of Breton and Norman names, but also the orientalism of its name and its cathedrals, Balbec and the Persian style); the opposition between the two côtés Guermantes and Méséglise, their multiple attributes and their final confusion due to the discovery of a path that joins them, nullifying the opposition. This is a chain of groups and alterations that it would be impossible to enumerate in all its rings, but in which, however, an individual cannot find any stability.

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Car si dans ces périodes de vingt ans les conglomérats de coteries se défaisaient et se reformaient selon l’attraction d’astres nouveaux destinés d’ailleurs eux aussi à s’éloigner, puis à reparaître, des cristallisations puis des émiettements suivis de cristallisations nouvelles avaient lieu dans l’âme des êtres. Si pour moi M.me de Guermantes avait été bien des ­personnes, pour M.me de Guermantes, pour M.me Swann, etc., telle personne donnée avait été un favori d’une époque précédant l’affaire Dreyfus, puis un fanatique ou un imbécile à partir de l’affaire Dreyfus, qui avait changé pour eux la valeur des êtres et classé autrement les partis, lesquels s’étaient depuis encore défaits et refaits. Ce qui y sert puissamment et y ajoute son influence aux pures affinités intellectuelles, c’est le temps écoulé, qui nous fait oublier nos antipathies, nos dédains, les raisons mêmes qui expliquaient nos antipathies et nos dédains. Si on avait analysé l’élégance de la jeune M.me de Cambremer, on y eût trouvé qu’elle était la fille du marchand de notre maison, jupien, et que ce qui avait pu s’ajouter à cela pour la rendre brillante, c’était que son père procurait des hommes à M. de Charlus. Mais tout cela combiné avait produit des effets scintillants, alors que les causes déjà lointaines, non seulement étaient inconnues.de beaucoup de nouveaux, mais encore que ceux qui les avaient connues les avaient oubliées, pensant beaucoup plus à l’éclat ­actuel qu’aux hontes passées, car on prend toujours un nom dans son acception actuelle. Et c’était l’intérêt de ces transformations de salons que’elles étaient aussi un effet du temps perdu et un phénomène de mémoire.12 12

iii, 992–993; Time Regained: « If in these periods of twenty years, the conglomerates of coteries had been demolished and reconstructed to suit new stars, themselves destined to disappear and to reappear, crystallisations and dispersals followed by new crystallisations had taken place in people’s souls. If the Duchesse de Guermantes had been many people to me, such and such a person had been a favourite of Mme. de Guermantes or of Mme. Swann at a period preceding the Dreyfus Affair, and a fanatic or imbecile afterwards because the Dreyfus Affair had changed their social valuations and regrouped people round parties which had since been unmade and remade. Time serves us powerfully by adding its influence to purely intellectual affinities; it is the passage of time that causes us to forget our antipathies, our contempts, and the very causes which gave birth to them. If anyone had formerly analysed the modish elegance of young Mme. Léonor de Cambremer, he would have discovered that she was the niece of the shopkeeper in our courtyard, to wit, Jupien, and that what had especially added to her prestige was that her father procured men for M. de Charlus. Yet, in combination, all this had produced an effect of brilliance, the now distant causes being unknown to most of the newcomers in society and forgotten by those who had been aware of them and valued to-day’s effulgence more highly than yesterday’s disgrace, for we always take a name at its present-day valuation. So

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4

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Theory of Identity

Let me recap the main lines of what I have roughly called Proust’s “theory of identity”: 1. The person is as conventional as their name, or rather as the many names they bear over time. But we must take this convention very seriously: if by”morning star” and “evening star” we can designate the same star, in the Search we are dealing with an authentic metamorphosis, which alters the spiritual properties, the bodies and the faces of the individuals designated over time with a certain name or another. It is like a christening, but it’s repeated several times. Rather than Cratylism, in Proust’s case it would be better to talk about shamanism: the princess of the Laumes is not the Duchess of Guermantes; the dame en rose is different from M.me de Crécy, from M.me Swann and from M.me de Forcheville; indeed, there are often fully opposite figures, like the Matron of the Verdurin clan and the princess of Guermantes. 2. What remains unchanged under such a variation, both superficial and profound? Not much. Ultimately, not even an anthropological determination, like the common belonging to the human race: in the bal de têtes we observe an alteration so profound as to transform a 1920s Parisian salon into a theater, a zoo, a natural history museum, an exhibition of science and technology. Like a jardin des plantes or an exposition Lépine, the Hotel Guermantes marks the terminal state not only of identity but also of humanity. 3. As for the mechanisms, that is, the “lois générales” which foreshadow and justify the bal de têtes and, with it, the truth value of the novel, which aims to investigate the profound functioning of reality and not its external manifestations, first of all there is the series. The other is always the ring of a serial chain. The names and behaviors are very eloquent from this point of view: Albertine has something of Gilberte even in her name, so much so that in Venice a telegram of the latter can be exchanged for a message from the former; similarly, Oriane and Gilberte will finally be united by the name, proper and common, of Guermantes; likewise, Albertine’s behaviors are such as to reproduce, in the Narrator, a jealousy entirely equal to that aroused by Odette in Swann (Proust insists a lot on this homology, and the Narrator is aware of it). But this is already the principle of another series, which concerns lovers and not loved ones: the interest of these social transformations was that they, too, were an effect of lost time and a phenomenon of memory ».

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jealousy unites in the same chain the Narrator and the character to whom he could resemble most, Swann; but that same affection binds Charles to Charlus in his relationship with Charlie; in turn, Charlus and Saint-Loup are united by the same lineage, but also by the same inclination for Charlie, whom the baron and the marquis (but also the prince) pursue like a pack of wolves. 4. Here the series blends with the group. The wolf is both an animal determination that refers to the ravenous pursuit, and the archetype of the band; it is the psychological quality shared by Saint-Loup when he defiles his artistic ideals by choosing, under the impulse of atavism, war and ­homosexuality—and by the Narrator-« Petit-loup » when he profanates the memory of his grandmother. In the series, identities appear as links in a chain whose archetype cannot be found; instead, the group represents the state of indistinction, the social, intellectual, love coteries that provide the background for the individualities that make up the series, and to which those individualities are destined to return (Swann hunted by the Guermantes and welcomed back into the bosom of Abraham). 5. What about identity? Who is the same and who is the other? A character creates a series, but is always already part of another series, and the invention of the other is invented by someone else; characters elect the other in a group and condemn the prejudices of that group, but inevitably lose the other by persecuting them with the atavisms of their own. The bal de têtes presents individuals as masks, but from the very beginning we find the repetition of stereotypes without personal roots: psychology is dramaturgy, but dramaturgy is always a repetition of a serial and transcendental scheme (the Narrator looks for his mother’s kiss in his series; but at the origin of that stolen kiss there is Swann, whose story with Odette foreshadows the Narrator’s story with Gilberte, Odette, Albertine). 6. Belonging to series and groups certainly makes identity unstable, but on the other hand it is precisely what makes identity usable and what confers the value of truth to art. As we have seen, the Proustian theory of “lois générales” is in line with a certain aesthetic Aristotelianism (mimesis concerns not the single case but the general law) and with a taste for constants in the biological, sociological and psychological fields. We know individuals only when we deny them as individuals and trace them back to a series. The love series or the biological and sociological groups are ultimately particular mechanisms of a more general legislative vision that leads individuals, groups, classes, lineages and nations to repeat few gestures and to incarnate

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identical albeit contradictory passions, prejudices and ideals because of the metamorphoses and the instabilities that dissolve people, nations and humanity. J’avais bien considéré toujours notre individu, à un moment donné du temps, comme un polypier où l’oeil, organisme indépendant bien qu’associé, si une poussière passe, cligne sans que l’intelligence l’apprenne, mais aussi dans la durée de la vie, comme une suite de moi juxtaposés mais distincts qui mouraient les uns après les autres ou même alternaient entre eux, comme ceux qu’à Combray prenaient pour moi la place l’un de l’autre quand venait le soir. Mais aussi j’avais vu que les cellules morales qui composent un être sont plus durables que lui. J’avais vu les vices, le courage des Guermantes revenir en Saint-Loup, comme en lui-même ses défauts étranges et brefs de caractère, comme le sémitisme de Swann. Je pouvais le voir encore en Bloch. Il avait perdu son père depuis quelques années et, quand je lui avais écrit à ce moment, n’avait pu d’abord me répondre, car outre les grands sentiments de famille qui existent souvent dans les familles juives, l’idée que son père était un homme tellement supérieur à tous, avait donné à son amour pour lui la forme d’un culte. Il n’avait pu supporter de le perdre et avait dû s’enfermer près d’une année dans une maison de santé. Il avait répondu à mes condoléances sur un ton à la fois profondément senti et presque hautain, tant il me jugeait enviable d’avoir approché cet homme supérieur dont il eût volontiers donné la voiture à deux chevaux à quelque musée historique. Et maintenant, à sa table de famille, la même colère qui animait M. Bloch contre M. Nissim Bernard animait Bloch contre son beau-père. Il lui faisait les mêmes sorties à la table. De même qu’en écoutant parler Cottard, Brichot, tant d’autres, j’avais senti que, par la culture et la mode, une seule ondulation propage dans toute l’étendue de l’espace les mêmes manières de dire, de penser, de même dans la durée du temps de grandes lames de fond soulèvent, des profondeurs des âges, les mêmes colères, les mêmes tristesses, les mêmes bravoures, les mêmes manies à travers les générations superposées, chaque séction prise à plusieurs d’une même série offrant la répétition, comme des ombres sur des écrans successifs, d’un tableau aussi identique, quoique souvent moins insignifiant, que celui qui mettait aux prises de la même façon Bloch et son beau-père, M. Bloch père et M. Nissim Bernard, et d’autres que je n’avais pas connus.13 13

iii, 943–944; Time Regained: « I had always thought of our own individuality at a given moment in time as a polypus whose eye, an independent organism, although associated

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With the recurrence of the word « même », this page is a treatise on the sameness that runs through the whole Search as a theory of identity that is different in itself (many selves in a person), but that by multiplying or decreasing does not acquire greater originality, but repeats recurrent habits, hysterias, collective ideals. The multiplicity of an individual is also the multitude of a community that has the automatisms and the energy of an alternating current. Proust is sensitive to the sociology of his time and to the vitalism of the Erlebniskunst when he compares the automatisms of the social body to those of the individual body; but his metaphysics goes much further when he concludes that the science of the Narrator is no different from that of the doctor, because in both cases one has to deal with general laws that make no difference between the supposed uniqueness of the spirit and the indifferent recurrence of nature. It would be a mistake to see this principle as a simple metaphor, or as the pure and simple trace of Proust’s father, Adrien, who was a famous doctor. The latter, rather, undergoes an original metamorphosis in the novel, and becomes an official of the foreign ministry (here we find again the organic metaphor, but above all a metaphysics of the stereotype: nations behave like ­bodies). with it, winks at a scatter of dust without orders from the mind, still more, whose intestines are infected by an obscure parasite without the intelligence being aware of it, and similarly of the soul as a series of selves juxtaposed in the course of life but distinct from each other which would die in turn or take turn about like those different selves which alternately took possession of me at Combray when evening came. But I had also observed that these moral cellules which constitute a being are more durable than itself. I had seen the vices and the bravery of the Guermantes return in Saint-Loup, as I had seen the strange and swift defects and then the loyal semitism of Swann. I could see it again in Bloch. After he had lost his father the idea, besides the strong familial sentiment which often exists in Jewish families, that his father was superior to everyone, had given the form of a cult to his love for him. He could not bear losing him and had shut himself up for nearly a year in a sanatorium. He had replied to my condolences in a deeply felt but almost haughty tone, so enviable did he consider me for having been acquainted with that distinguished man whose carriage and pair he would have gladly given to a historical museum. And at his family table (for contrary to what the Duchesse de Guermantes believed, he was married) the same anger which animated M. Bloch senior against M. Nissim Bernard animated Bloch against his father-in-law. He made the same attacks on him. In the same way when I listened to the talk of Cottard, Brichot and so many others I had felt that by culture and fashion a single undulation propagates identical modes of speech and thought in the whole expanse of space, and in the same way, throughout the duration of time, great fundamental currents raise from the depths of the ages the same angers, the same sorrows, the same boasts, the same manias, throughout superimposed generations, each section accepting the criteria of various levels of the same series and reproducing, like shadows upon successive screens, pictures similar to though often less insignificant than that which brought Bloch and his father-in-law, M. Bloch senior and M. Nissim Bernard and others I never knew, to blows. ».

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What we find in the novel are self-repeating moral cells and organisms. But the successive selves are not only organic: their alternation is also mechanical, it recalls the statuettes of a barometer (which could rejoice in good weather even when the organism containing them was close to death). This is the principle of inorganic recursion by which—like a medical stethoscope, an astronomical telescope or a pair of glasses—a book can be used to see, in the repetitiveness of the acts and characters narrated, general laws that also apply to ­readers—« d’autres que je n’avais pas connus ». Identities embody many differences and various types of repetitions: SaintLoup repeats familiar atavisms, but also certain peculiar habits; Bloch repeats the paternal behavior with Nissim Bernard (which is equal to that of M. Verdurin with Saniette), but also his own authoritarian conduct with his sisters. But in Bloch’s behavior there is certainly also much of the Narrator, with his guilt in front of the Jewish pietas of his friend—a pietas which he betrayed instead by fulfilling Charlus’s prophecy, and not caring about his grandmother; while Bloch, who now mourns his father, has never performed the staging dreamed by the baron, beating his mother in a Jewish farce for the benefit of the gentiles. 5

Psychology, Sociology, Biology

The plurality of (spiritual, sensible, nominal) selves included in a person, their succession and their final alteration do not constitute a failure in the artistic and gnoseological apprenticeship of the Search. Rather, the multiplicity and alteration of identities are indeed what allows for a true knowledge of people and of their more complex aggregations (series, groups, classes, lineages, nations). When stable and well-founded identifications disappear, along with those individuals and those coteries that the inexperienced Narrator thought were incorruptible, experience allows him to see unstable and repetitive ­aggregations, which can be known precisely insofar as they are recurrent. The dissolution of identities—formed first and foremost by our and other’s prejudices and imagination—allows for the emergence of the true laws of knowledge. On the one hand, the repetitiveness and generality of the conscious acts of individuals and peoples provide us with scientific knowledge, allowing for the classification of the intentions and wills of the individuals, who instead consider them unique and original. We recognize structures in which the supposed originality of the individual is actually an ethereal pseudo-will; and this lesson can only come from time, because only in time can sufficient material

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be accumulated for a comparative psycho-sociology: Elstir seems to the Narrator to be a prototype of goodness and artistic superiority; but over the years he learns about a young Elstir who, following the Verdurin tribe with the affected name of M. Biche, was just as stupid and evil as his successor Ski. Comparing M. Biche and Elstir, the Narrator is surprised, and Elstir sees in his youthful bétise the medium of a maturation that would have led him to be an emblem of pictorial sublimity. But the lesson of the Search is different, more structural than historical or biographical: the selves that follow one another in the same person are objectively different and do not communicate with each other. Biche and Elstir are really different beings of which the life of the painter is the inert container; what really matters is the taxonomic possibility offered by the comparison between Biche and Ski—equally stupid and evil, they unintentionally reflect the tastes and prejudices of the same structure or coterie, i.e. the Verdurin tribe or clan. The clan, in turn, will die by migrating into the Hôtel Guermantes; but, here too, the involuntary will produce metamorphoses, revivals and series—by evoking certain tics of the Matron who have not yet disappeared (“Oui, nous ferons clan!”), or by reviving the Matron and her tribe in a surprising chassécroisé. M.me Verdurin dies and is reborn as the princess of Guermantes, but the Matron lives in the duchess of Guermantes, driven by an atavistic taste for degradation. At the bal de têtes Oriane is prey to M.me Verdurin’s artistic and cultural delusions, her insincere disregard for the aristocracy and her relative social marginalization. Both hate the Faubourg for its snobbery, the duchess because she is too well received and eager to surprise after having touched the social apogee allowed to her condition; the Matron, because she is not well received, and would give all her Wagnerian pianists just to be invited by a duke. If the latter’s worldly dreams are realized at the price of becoming another person, the duchess’s intellectual and antiaristocratic frissons find an equal, albeit antithetical, fulfillment: the new worldly generations, unaware of her past, already consider her an eccentric. Hence the gnoseological value of the involuntary: only that which arises from an obscure bêtise and from a headless structure allows for a generalization and a lesson; deconstructing the individuals and their mediocre or even sublime pseudo-wills, we find laws that make them teachable. This is how Proust creates the telescope which, examining and assimilating micrologies that as such may seem unrepeatable, outlines a system of the stereotype and the obtuse. This knowledge may perhaps have a therapeutic value, at least après coup. It is probable that the Narrator gets some consolation from recognizing the law behind his love affairs, isolating the homology that assimilates in a single mechanism his passion for Albertine and Swann’s love for Odette—­discovering

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even that Swann, to whom he wanted to resemble as a child (because he deprived him of his mother), gave him not only the generic form, but the very matter of his experience, so that over time not only Albertine and Odette unite in an affective unit, but even the idealized other identifies with « celui qui parle et dit je ». However, therapy is largely superfluous: the self that recognizes and examines the laws of his love affairs and identifications is different from the self that loved Albertine and admired Swann, and has long ceased to be jealous or envious for those reasons. The main usefulness of these laws of the involuntary, at least for the Narrator, consists in the fact that they show him the mechanics of artistic creation, its ingredients and necessary qualities, after he had radically questioned whether he had them. For the Narrator, what is the world before the Search, before Swann, the Guermantes, Albertine, etc.? A nebula marked by affections, a missed kiss, the geography and the rituality of certain walks in the countryside, the gaze of Gilberte and that of Charlus. The progress of the apprenticeship develops these threads of affection, constructs and deconstructs them, classifies them (recurring missed kiss: the beloved as an être de fuite; the sociological implications of the two côtés, which come to correspond to salons, ­people and situations; the gaze as promesse de bonheur—Gilberte launches the same glances as Albertine will do later—or as a symptom of madness— Charlus’ look at Combray will return in Balbec, and again at the last meeting on the Champs Elysées). On the one hand, the nebula unfolds, but on the other it becomes more complicated, because the thread of elementary affections, of the pure involuntary, creates new connections and is embodied in new contexts and individuals. The complex nebula undergoes a process of explanation, but also of complication, opening up new universes, groups, situations.14 It is therefore not surprising that, at the end of the Search, the world appears again as a nebula: what was initially confused has been explained, but the explanation has brought new complications with it. However, there is an important difference between the initial condition and the conclusion of the apprenticeship: the Narrator now knows the general laws. The world remains a symbolic fabric in which the threads of the involuntary, passion and bêtise are intertwined, but the recursion of these tendencies makes it possible to empty the peremptoriness of our beliefs, the illusion of pseudo-wills.

14

For an analysis of the chains of impersonal affections in the Search and in Proust’s unpublished works, see the previous chapter.

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The Hôtel de Guermantes turns into a zoo or a greenhouse, denying once again the idea of a stable nature of identities. But the most surprising metamorphoses are those that occur in the Narrator: the shocks of the involuntary. Comme le personnage des Mille et une Nuits qui sans le savoir accomplissait précisément le rite qui faisait apparaître, visible pour lui seul, un docile génie prêt à le transporter au loin, une nouvelle vision d’azur passa devant mes yeux; mais il était pur et salin, il se gonfla en mamelles bleuâtres; l’impression était si forte que le moment que je vivais me sembla être le moment actuel; plus hébété que le jour où je me demandais si j’allais vraiment être accueilli par la princesse de Guermantes ou si tout n’allait pas s’effondrer, je croyais que le domestique venait d’ouvrir la fenêtre sur la plage et que tout m’invitait à descendre me promener le long de la digue à marée haute; la serviette que j’avais prise pour m’essuyer la bouche avait précisément le genre de raideur et d’empesé de celle avec laquelle j’avais eu tant de peine à me sécher devant le fenêtre, le premier jour de mon arrivée à Balbec, et, maintenant, devant cette bibliothèque de l’hôtel de Guermantes, elle déployait, reparti dans ses pans et dans ses cassures, le plumage d’un océan vert et bleu comme la queue d’un paon. Et je ne jouissais pas que de ces couleurs, mais de tout un istant de ma vie qui les soulevait, qui avait été sans doute aspiration vers elles, dont quelque sentiment de fatigue ou de tristesse m’avait peut-être empêché de jouir à Balbec, et qui maintenant, débarassé de ce qu’il y a d’imparfait dans la perception extérieure, pur et désincarné, me gonflait d’allégresse.15 15

iii, 868–869; Time Regained: « like the personage in the Thousand and One Nights who unknowingly accomplished the rite which caused the appearance before him of a docile genius, invisible to others, ready to transport him far away, a new azure vision passed before my eyes; but this time it was pure and saline and swelled into shapes like bluish udders. The impression was so strong that the moment I was living seemed to be one with the past and (more bewildered still than I was on the day when I wondered whether I was going to be welcomed by the Princesse de Guermantes or whether everything was going to melt away), I believed that the servant had just opened the window upon the shore and that everything invited me to go downstairs and walk along the sea-wall at high tide; the napkin upon which I was wiping my mouth had exactly the same kind of starchiness as that with which I had attempted with so much difficulty to dry myself before the window the first day of my arrival at Balbec and within the folds of which, now, in that library of the Guermantes mansion, a green-blue ocean spread its plumage like the tail of a peacock. And I did not merely rejoice in those colours, but in that whole instant which produced them, an instant towards which my whole life had doubtless aspired, which a feeling of fatigue or sadness had prevented my ever experiencing at Balbec but which now,

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The apprentissage shows that the qualities attributed to people and countries with our imagination, as well as their supposed identities, are completely random, as they are due to a convention, a rumor, an imprinting (which moreover generally applies only to us). At its peak, it shows how all the determinations brought by experience are mixed up in a lottery of heads, titles, names. But the apprentissage also shows that the tinkling of a teaspoon or a rough napkin can resurrect a previous world, and, along the line of a sensible quality charged with affections, one can find the threads of a symbolic fabric that goes back to the Combray-nebula that the Narrator thought he had fully explained, or to the Balbec-nebula, with the further nebulae that come with it—the band of jeunes filles or the encyclopedia of Breton and Norman names. In love affairs, series were established on the basis of recurrent sensible qualities of which one was not aware, guided by a pseudo-will—and the same happened in every other kind of world and of passions, society, art, nature. The awareness of the general laws that govern this seriality comes very late, at the end of the story, but it fully reveals the power of the involuntary, the fortuitous and the inevitable. The Narrator loved Albertine, Oriane, Gilberte, because they were as fugitive as his mother, and the mother is already included in the Swann series—the one that takes away the sleep and the kiss from the Narrator, and that has already experienced with Odette the story that «  celui qui parle et dit je » will relive with Albertine. It is a chain of affections that precedes the people in which it is incarnated, and which in itself, in its involuntary essence, is completely heterogeneous to the contexts, times and places in which it is repeated. The shocks in the courtyard and in the library are no different from the serial loves; the thrill and happiness they produce is due to the fact that experiences of that kind are the justification of a story that will seek the threads of the involuntary, unceasingly constructing and deconstructing the social contexts and individual souls in which it acts. This is why it is wrong to say that there is a contradiction between the negative shocks of the bal de têtes and the positive ones, namely the euphoric resurrections of the past that accompany the revelation of the Narrator’s literary vocation. Likewise, it is wrong to see the bal de têtes as too hasty a masquerade or unmasking, unrelated to the rest of lost time. Identities therefore have a mainly negative value in the Search: they tend to dissolution and unmasking, although they also have positive functions subordinate to the general demonstration that contests them (for example, if there pure, disincarnated and freed from the imperfections of exterior perceptions, filled me with joy. ».

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were no identities there would not be even the series that found them and empty them, nor would there be passages from one group to another in pursuit of a person). A metaphysics of the involuntary can only see identity as a partial, artificial and transitory moment, at least if we conceive a subject as a ­human, volitional and rational form; and in fact Proust’s psychology and sociology are alien to any anthropology: the changes in people and society do not reflect the ideals of humanity nor can they be deduced from a clear conception of humankind (a taylor, a duke, and a Jew do not seem to descend from a common lineage, they differ as much as a house differs from a mountain, and ­communications between these worlds are mere tricks: a Jew can deceive a Guermantes and make them believe he shares their spirit, but at some point the attraction of the original lineage will prevail, opening a gap and removing the maquillage). It is not a question of racism, but rather of its opposite: the races or classes of people differ from one another like animal species, and in the face of the ideal of man and subject that individuals and nations pursue, we are all like trained monkeys who play their part, be it badly or sublimely—yet suddenly some start leaping around like a hyena, some look like a salmon, some even resemble a doll, a stone, a gramophone. And in fact people end up behaving in a way that is perfidiously far from the ideals of humanity which they claim to uphold, and which for the most part they profess with conviction: we must love those who love us, but the current rule is rather the opposite, we must be hard and evil; we believe we cannot cope with the death of close relatives, then we discover we don’t really care; we could help someone without too much effort, and we refuse to do so (Saint-Loup was never called back from Morocco during military service, and Oriane never said the few words needed); we feel secret joy when we learn that a friend of ours is sick or dead (the bal de têtes treats with great humor the many versions of this contradiction between ­humanitarian ideals and secret wickedness). From this point of view, in addition to a negative theory of the subject, the Search also embodies a negative anthropology: the infinite “we” that unites people according to vast and little practiced ideals dissolves following the antithetical determinations of race, species, sex, family, and genealogy. But identity and humanity are not denied in the name of a Dostoevskian underground vision, of a psychology of the depth of the human soul. The involuntary is a mechanism rather than a thought: it contradicts the human as an ideal or as an intellectual, conscious and finite representation. In the Search, the apology of bêtises and bêtes is a practical refutation of the mystifications related to will and intelligence, but it is also the way in which it is possible to recognize a positive, innocent and non-mystified state that belongs not to identity but to the

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beings containing many swirling selves, always different and yet always apparently founded and definitive. En fermant les yeux, en perdant la conscience, Albertine avait dépouillé, l’un après l’autre, ces différents caractères d’humanité qui m’avaient déçu depuis le jour où j’avais fait sa connaissance. Elle n’était plus animée que de la vie inconsciente des végétaux, des arbres.16 Thus Albertine turns into a plant:17 when awake, intelligence drives Albertine to imitate a flower, with bad results; it is only the involuntary that brings the jeune fille en fleurs to her true essence, to her vegetable origin and to her destiny, which is no longer that of a human being, but that of a plant, or other nonhuman beings (as Deleuze put it, « it is when she is held prisoner that she emits the particles of a bird. And it is when she flees, launches down a line of flight, that she becomes-horse, even if it is the horse of death. »). Albertine’s becoming-animal is the perfect realization of the innocence and sincerity which, when awake, only transpired from her bêtise, from the awkwardness with which she sometimes let the truth slip during the jealous interrogations of the Narrator. « Ses sourcils arqués comme je ne les avais jamais vus entournaient les globes de ses paupières comme un doux nid d’alcyon. Des races, des atavismes, des vices reposaient sur son visage ».18 Albertine’s bêtise when she is interrogated, her becoming-flower when she sleeps, her becoming-horse when she escapes, are the condensation of a universal experience that culminates in the bal de têtes, but whose threads run throughout the novel: floral lines; ornithological metamorphoses in which Albertine’s mythological and literary theme intertwines with rue de l’Oiseau in Combray, the Narrator-magpie in Céleste Albaret’s praise and the men as “prophet birds” in the bal de têtes. There are also mineral threads in the transformation of beings into statues or stones (Charlus and the metallic flashes of his head and his eyes, the women-statues of the bal de têtes, the grandmother who in agony becomes a funerary stone profaned by therapeutic leeches).

16

17 18

iii, 70; The Captive: « By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different human characters with which she had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance. She was animated now only by the unconscious life of vegetation, of trees ». Cf. G. Deleuze-F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 275 ff. iii, 72; The Captive: « Her eyebrows, arched as I had never seen them, enclosed the globes of her eyelids like a halcyon’s downy nest. Races, atavisms, vices reposed upon her face. ».

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Et certes il n’y aurait pas que ma grand’mère, pas qu’Albertine, mais bien d’autres encore dont j’avais pu assimiler une parole, un regard, mais qu’en tant que créatures individuelles je ne me rappelais plus; un livre est un grand cimetière où sur la plupart des tombes on ne peut plus lire les noms effacés. Parfois au contraire on se souvient très bien du nom, mais sans savoir si quelque chose de l’être qui le porta survit dans ces pages. Cette jeune fille aux prunelles profondément enfoncées, à la voix traînante, estelle ici? et si elle y repose en effet, dans quelle partie? on ne sait plus, et comment trouver sous les fleurs?.19 19

iii, 903; Time Regained: « And certainly there were many others besides my grandmother and Albertine from whom I had assimilated a word, a glance, but of whom as individual beings I remembered nothing; a book is a great cemetery in which, for the most part, the names upon the tombs are effaced. Sometimes, on the other hand, one writes a well remembered name without knowing whether anything else survives of the being who bore it. That young girl with the deep sunken eyes, with the haunting voice, is she there? And if she is, in which part, where are we to look for her under the flowers? ».

Problems with Autobiography 1

The Autobiographical Pact

What makes an autobiography? The most obvious answer is by far the least convincing. It is not enough to say that the novel speaks of fictitious events, in which references to actual facts and people are purely accidental, while the biography and autobiography report supposedly real events more or less faithfully. In fact, this division overlaps two completely heterogeneous criteria: a criterion that implies an assertion of reality (“A biography is a true story”), and which is rarely verifiable; and a second criterion, relatively ascertainable, which would consist in a differentiation of literary genres, whereby the author makes a contract with his future readers and indicates the genre in which they should place the work in question: essay, novel, lyric, biography, autobiography, shopping list. Here the concept of autobiography can be defined within the canons of a literary history and an aesthetic of reception. These canons have nothing to do with the objective truth of what is narrated in the autobiography: even if all that is written in Confessiones, in Dichtung und Wahrheit, or in Confessions of a Beautiful Soul was false, Augustine, Rousseau and Goethe could perhaps be considered liars, but their works would not necessarily cease to be classified as autobiographies. The contract with the reader, betrayed in his good faith, would essentially retain its validity. This is the case with an explicit contract, a subtitle, a premise, an epigraph that announces: “This is an autobiography—signed Augustine, Goethe, Rousseau”. It is with this pragmatic status of a contract between an author and a reader, that the autobiography has been characterized in recent years by literary theorists and philosophers, such as Philippe Lejeune, Paul de Man, and John R. Searle.1 However, autobiography can seemingly only be given a pragmatic definition, and this indicates a great number of difficulties as regards the concept of autobiography, and the claim of truth that lies therein. We adopt a pragmatic definition when can’t do better, that is, when we recognize the impossibility of safely ascertaining something (in this case, the truth or falsity of a certain book, its veracity towards the life of its author). For this reason, the 1 Cf. Ph. Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique, Seuil, Paris 1975; P. De Man, « Autobiography As De-Facement », in Id., The Rhetoric of Romanticism, Columbia U.P., New York 1984, pp. 67–81; J.R. Searle, « The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse », in New Literary History, vi, 2 (Winter 1975), pp. 319–332; E.W. Bruss, Autobiographical Acts. The Changings Situation of a Literary Genre, The Johns Hopkins U.P., Baltimore 1976. For an overall perspective on the latest studies on autobiography, see the monographic issue of Poétique, n. 56 (November 1983).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004431232_005

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distinction between novel and autobiography based on the truth or falsity of their objects does not hold, if by truth we mean a certain objectively verifiable state of things—and the way in which this distinction is redefined pragmatically actually implements a Copernican revolution with respect to the naive definition of autobiography. Now the text is supposed to say true things, not because we can verify it, but because we accept whatever a determined subject, i.e. the author, tells us about the text they wrote. What if the author has left no indications in this regard? If I find the manuscript, say a diary, of one of my ancestors in a drawer, how can I establish that this diary is a true autobiography, and is not instead a literary fiction in which, by accident or by the taste of literary complication, the fictitious protagonist carries the name of my ancestor? All the criteria of recognition have great margins of randomness (starting from that by which, for example, family traditions and encyclopedias do not speak of my ancestor as a man of letters. This proves nothing, because that novel would inscribe him in literary history, and likewise if it turned out that my ancestor was a writer, that would not have prevented him from keeping a diary). This is not as extreme a case as one may think. The uncertainty in determining whether a text is autobiographical or not, when the author has not left precise indications on the subject, or even when the author has explicitly left them, is relatively frequent. For example: is President Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness an autobiography? From a certain point of view, undoubtedly yes. The president of the Dresden court writes his memoirs and then signs them by qualifying them as an autobiographical story. But the president was mad: his checks could probably not have been cashed, so why should we accept his signature in this particular contract, while denying its validity in any other context? It would be easy to object that the two types of contract (the autobiographical pact and the bank check) are constitutively different, and that autobiography (which is spiritual) cannot be compared to reality (which is mundane). But then (the more the autobiography is “mental”, subjective, dreamlike or paranoid) the concept of autobiography gets further and further away from the realm of recorded, historical and therefore also accountable reality, which is what supposedly marks its difference with respect to the novel—so that the autobiographical narrative and the narrative tout court are separated by an increasingly evanescent distinction. If Daniel Paul Schreber’s inner autobiography is also part of the autobiography genre, then how can we deny that Molly Bloom’s monologue is actually part of Nora Joyce’s biography (and that, of course, Madame Bovary is Flaubert’s diary, not by conjecture, but by explicit declaration of the author)? But let us leave aside this potentially endless number of cases, and ask the question about the essence of autobiography from a slightly different point of

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view. Basically, the only merit of the autobiographical pact theory consists in shifting the Archimedean point on which a characterization of the autobiography rests, showing how the novel-autobiography distinction is not founded on objective and positively verifiable grounds, but on somewhat subjective ­bases—those of a fiduciary contract between author and reader for which a certain text must be taken as a truthful story or as a fantastic invention. Which, on closer inspection, excludes the problem of truth and fiction, or at least places the issue on a very different level. In the case of the naive distinction by which autobiography = truth and novel = fiction, autobiography falls within the field of objective truth, and, at least ideally, is placed next to science in opposition to the novel qua illusion. In the case of the pragmatic definition, the story is different, provided pragmatics is not taken too dogmatically—as if the speech act that consists in declaring, for example, “I, the undersigned Jean-Jacques Rousseau, declare that Les confessions is an autobiography, and Nouvelle Héloise a novel” happened in a context that was unquestionably clear, and not variable due to critical, historical, philological, hermeneutical, psychoanalytical, etc. factors. Indeed, in the case of the pragmatic definition between novel and autobiography, with the due hermeneutical warnings, we observe an important modification with respect to the naive distinction. Novel and autobiography are no longer opposed as fiction to truth, but as two types of fiction, or as two types of truth, which have nothing to do with the objective status of truth in science (and in history, if understood objectively). Consider In Search of Lost Time. Here the undecidability between novel and autobiography—an undecidability, that, as we have seen, is implicit in a pragmatic perspective of the autobiographical pact—is taken to extremes. Certainly the Search is a novel: most of the characters have invented names, or at least names that at the time of writing did not correspond to anyone’s data (Proust used to inquire with friends and acquaintances to know if a certain name was still used, and only if it was no longer in use did he include it in the name repertoire of the Search); the Narrator only twice admits that he is called Marcel, but otherwise the entire family of Proust’s register is distorted (the qualities of the mother are largely transferred to the grandmother, the father is doubled, and reappears under many masks, the brother is completely erased, etc.); bubbles of historical truth and real people and names float sporadically in a sea that is essentially literary. But on the other hand, it is also certainly an autobiography, in the most canonical form—in the wake of Augustine, Rousseau, and Goethe: the story of a soul and a literary vocation, the deceptions, the falls and the truths of a temporal experience with wide references to a truly experienced historical world. Proust’s acquaintances knew this very well: long before George D. Painter’s

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monumental attempt,2 they began to read Proust’s life and his novel in parallel. The countless photographic books showing the “originals” of the Search (the father and mother, and then the Bibesco, Montesquiou, etc.), and the pilgrimages to the house of Illiers-Combray are perhaps morbid and fetishistic, but by no means stupid or unfounded. In itself, it is not a great challenge as regards the autobiographical character of the Search to point out that, for example, Albertine’s original would have been Reynaldo Hahn, a Cuban pianist and composer. The point is a different one, and leads us to the heart of the question of autobiography as it arises once we take seriously the problems (and the undecidables) raised by the pragmatic definition of the autobiographical pact. Proust does not believe that between novel and autobiography there is a real difference—or at least he does not identify the first with fiction and the second with truth. A lived life can simply be an illusion, a sweet madness, writes Proust; and artistic realism producing a cinematographic reproduction of that sweet madness would be far from the truth. On the other hand, the novel as a work of art (therefore, unrealistic) is always closely related to the truth—not so much because it puts us in contact with hyperuranian states of being or things, but because it shows us what actually but obscurely happens in our lives and in the lives of those we have known. It is a matter of restoring to the smallest signs the meaning that habit has taken away from it. Art is creation, but creation in a proper and biological sense. From this point of view and from a perspective that, as we shall see, is absolutely classic, Proust believes that great art, precisely qua creation, is always biography and autobiography in a physiological and etymological sense. Biography and autobiography are the nature of every text written to the extent that it is able to recover the sense of a past, « to give life back to the bloodless shadows of the past »,3 as Dilthey writes in his essay on autobiography. The past, whether true or fictitious, is fulfilled as an autobiography or biography only when its meaning establishes a vital relationship with the present, through the mediation of writing. If it remained dead letter, not even the most objective tale of a historical life could aspire to the status of biography. It is in the continuity between a past life and the new life that it takes in the eyes of other readers and successive generations, that any writing acquires its biographical 2 G.D. Painter, Marcel Proust, Chatto, London 1959, and 1965, 2 vols. The tendency to identify the Search with Proust’s life is so vast that it cannot be considered a collective error, but simply the perversion of a normal tendency. In the bibliography that concludes Jacque-Yves Tadié’s Proust (Belfond, Paris 1983) there are 27 biographies, which is undoubtedly a lot, for an author who died less than a hundred years ago. 3 W. Dilthey, Meaning in History: W. Dilthey’s Thoughts on History and Society, Allen and Unwin, 1961, p. 87.

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dignity. This is very clearly indicated by Proust when he writes that the goal of his novel is to provide a pair of glasses for future readers to read inside themselves. 2

The Writing of Life

It is in this axiology that the peculiar modulation of the autobiographical pact in Proust is to be sought. This pact does not consist in assuring readers that everything that is narrated is literally true, but on the contrary in showing the constitutive illusion that is life as lost time, and the need to rediscover the truth through another story whose truth we have not noticed in life. This is the peak of Proust’s theory of classicism, where the idea of autobiography as a recreation of life and as a redemption of the past it is not based on the mimesis of historical reality, of lost time, but vice versa on an alliance between narrative fiction and autobiography as re-creation of life. Really lived life and the phenomenal “reality”, no less than science, are a simple deception. (Just consider how little doctors know of the human body, and how fruitless their therapies are). To find true reality, one has to take a leap beyond the distinction between reality and lies, attempting to create harmony between heaven and earth, between the reality of art and life as it is artistically recreated in a “novelistic” autobiography. This alliance is established starting from a twofold rejection: the demonization of society life and of lost time in general, which are the mortal enemies of writing; and the exclusion of literary realism, considered as the mechanical reproduction proper to the apparent and lost life in which our temporal experience is immersed. The reality of lost time is hostile to writing. Honored in society, writers are actually subjected to continuous attacks. First there is the tendency of aristocratic coteries to make men of genius unproductive; then there is the idea, indispensable for the self-affirmation of social life, that salons bring useful spiritual nourishment for writers—which is not true at all: because of that widespread belief, the Narrator has lost all his time responding to invitations and going to matinées. In some cases (as happens in Bergotte) social life even has deadly effects: he is sick and would like to stay at home, but everyone is convinced that he is depressed due to lack of distractions; they will continue to invite him despite the illness, and in any case the Narrator himself will continue to look for invitations while he is in the sanatorium, and he will also end up going to the Elstir exhibition, where he will die. But beyond these practical antagonisms, the allergy between bios and biography is presented in a constitutive or transcendental form. The two activities

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involve the exercise of faculties that are mutually exclusive instead of integrating with each other, as the worldly theodicy claims. In the world there is the rule of intelligent conversation and voluntary self-presence; memory means remembering invitations, oblivion is the guilty activity of forgetting them; all worldly morality is focused on the here and now of what is happening at a specific moment in a salon. In biography and autobiography it is instead a ­matter of asserting silence and recollection, preparing oneself to listen to involuntary memory—and therefore autobiographical morality requires first of all that one forgets about invitations. The Narrator fully experiences this ­antagonism, which will ultimately engage two different selves—the mundane self and the writing self—that are heterogeneous, conflicting, different in everything. The project of a realistic art is then completely meaningless. Quelques-uns voulaient que le roman fût une sorte de défilé cinématographique des choses. Cette conception était absurde. Rien ne s’éloigne plus de ce que nous avons perçu en réalité qu’une telle vue cinématographique.4 The reality of realistic art is unreal. It is a long dream, analogous to the sleep that pervades our entire life in society, which constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to the writing of a novel, while it provides constant nourishment for realistic books or for the memories that relate the things that happened in salons, battles and embassies. Hence the disappointment that the Narrator feels when he reads the description of the Verdurin parlor in the Goncourt diary. It is a twofold disappointment, because the realistic story does not find correspondence in the memory of the Narrator (who are we talking about? who are these nice and refined people? where is the vulgarity of the small Verdurin clan, where is the meanness and even cruelty that the faithful and the Mistress exercise towards people much superior to them, like Swann or Charlus?). On the other hand, the Narrator feels unable to even tell the simple facts of that sleepwalker’s life; his literary skills are much more discontinuous, and above all they are not exercised on the surface, but dwell on an uncertain and hardly communicable depth.

4 iii, 882–883; Time Regained: «  Some of them wanted the novel to be a sort of cinematographic procession. This conception was absurd. Nothing removes us further from the reality we perceive within ourselves than such a cinematographic vision ».

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Il en résultait qu’en réunissant toutes les remarques que j’avais pu faire dans’ un dîner sur les convives, le dessin des lignes tracées par moi figurait un ensemble de lois psychologiques où l’intérêt propre qu’avait eu dans ses discours le convive ne tenait presque aucune place. Mais cela enlevait-il tout mérite à mes portraits puisque je ne les donnais pas pour tels?5 So far we have seen an antagonism that opposes life and writing in Proust as two mutually exclusive activities. But in the contestation of realistic art we can find something more complicated than this simple opposition. A dialectic is drawn by which it is not life that opposes writing, but there are two types of writing, two types of life and also two types of memory and other faculties that are opposed to one another: a social life in solidarity with realistic art is opposed to an authentic life (which is not necessarily an interior life) and an art capable of recreating it; in opposing each other, the two lives and the two types of writing also refere to two memories, the voluntary memory that records the apparent life, and the involuntary memory that causes the resurrection of a pure past—of that past that had never been present in social life, not because the pure past is unreal, but on the contrary because social life is unreal. But let’s get to the point that we are most interested in here. The contrast between two lives, two writings, and two memories, which takes the place of the simple opposition between life and writing, ultimately qualifies as a more radical alternative than any poetic choice could ever be: it is a contrast between life and death. Social life, realistic writing, voluntary memory are rather death than life—they are inertia, oblivion, sleep or dream. Real life, the art that gives it back, involuntary memory, are the only form of life, one that is emancipated from the apparent life of society. Mais cette découverte que l’art pouvait nous faire faire, n’était- elle pas, au fond, celle de ce qui devrait nous être le plus précieux, et qui nous reste d’habitude à jamais inconnu, notre vraie vie, la réalité telle que nous l’avons sentie, et qui diffère tellement de ce que nous croyons, que

5 iii, 719: « From that it resulted that in collating all the observations I had been able to make about the guests in the course of a dinner, the design of the lines traced by me would form a unity of psychological laws in which the interest pertaining to the discourse of a particular guest occupied no place whatever. But were my portraits denuded of all merit because I did not compose them merely as portraits? ».

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nous sommes emplis d’un tel bonheur quand un hasard nous apporte le souvenir véritable?6 For Proust, great art is biography—not primarily as the narrative of a life, but mainly as writing capable of recreating life. Habit and intelligent conversations (i.e. the whole of social automatisms) are just obstacles to art: they take away time, not only because they waste it, but above all because they make us lose the notion of time and life, plunging us dans cette douce folie que nous avons au cours de la vie, à laquelle nous nous prêtons, mais que du fond de notre intelligence nous savons l’erreur d’un fou qui croirait que les meubles vivent et causerait avec eux.7 Il me fallait rendre aux moindres signes qui m’entournaient (Guermanles, Albertine, Gilberte, Saint-Loup, Balbec, etc.) leur sens que l’habitude leur avait fait perdre pour moi. Et quand nous aurons atteint la réalité, pour l’exprimer, pour la conserver nous écarterons ce qui est différent d’elle et que ne cesse de nous apporter la vitesse acquise de l’habitude.8 The link between art and creation, between art and life, between writing and biography, is put forward by Proust to the letter. Quant au livre intérieur de signes inconnus […] pour la lecture desquels personne ne pouvait m’aider d’aucune règle, cette lecture consistait en un acte de création où nul ne peut nous suppléer ni même collaborer avec nous. 9

6 iii, 881: « But is not that discovery, which art may enable us to make, most precious to us, a discovery of that which for most of us remains for ever unknown, our true life, reality as we have ourselves felt it and which differs so much from that which we had believed that we are filled with delight when chance brings us an authentic revelation of it? ». 7 iii, 875: « a sweet madness which overcomes us in life and to which we yield, though at the back of our minds we know it to be the error of a lunatic who imagines the furniture to be alive and talks to it ». 8 iii, 897: « It was, therefore, necessary for me to discover the meaning of the slightest signs that surrounded me (Guermantes, Albertine, Gilberte, Saint-Loup, Balbec, et cetera) which I had lost sight of owing to habit. We have to learn that to preserve and express reality when we have attained it, we must isolate it from everything that our habit of haste accumulates in opposition to it. ». 9 iii, 879: « no one could help me read by any rule, for its reading consists in an act of creation in which no one can take our place and in which no one can collaborate. » (italics added).

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And again: Ce livre, le plus pénible de tous à déchiffrer, est aussi le seul dont l’“impression” ait été faite en nous par la réalité même. De quelque idée laissée en nous par la vie qu’il s’agisse, sa figure matérielle, trace de l’impression qu’elle nous a faite, est encore le gage de sa vérité nécessaire. 10 Art is creation, and writing has the power of resurrection. This is the peak of a theory of classicism. Proust, with a great aesthetic and hermeneutical energy, tears the link between art, life and creation away from the field of commonplaces and returns it to its most proper meaning. And this is perhaps the true redemption of lost time, if there can be such a thing. This is the meaning of biography according to Dilthey: the highest form of the reflection of life on itself, the model used by historians and philologists, who know how to extract the vital meaning from the dead letters transmitted by tradition, how to resurrect the spirit deposited in the letter as in a crypt, so as to bring the whole past back to its most authentic life. « Autobiography is merely the literary expression of a man’s reflection on the course of his life. […] It, alone, makes historical insight possible. The power and breadth of our own lives and the energy with which we reflect on them are the foundation of historical vision ».11 In Proust, literature shows us cette réalité que nous risquerions Fort de mourir sans avoir connue, et qui est tout simplement notre vie. La vraie vie, la vie enfin découverte et éclaircie, la seule vie par conséquent réellement vécue, c’est la littérature.12 Une minute affranchie de l’ordre du temps a recréé en nous, pour la sentir, l’homme affranchi de l’ordre du temps. Et celui- là, on comprend qu’il soit confiant dans sa joie, même si le simple goût d’une madeleine ne semble pas contenir logiquement les raisons de cette joie, on ­comprend

10

11 12

iii, 880: « That book which is the most arduous of all to decipher is the only one which reality has dictated, the only one printed within us by reality itself. Whatever idea life has left in us, its material shape, mark of the impression it has made on us, is still the necessary pledge of its truth ». W. Dilthey, op. cit., pp. 86–7. iii, 895; Time Regained: « a reality we run the risk of never knowing before we die but which is our real, our true life at last revealed and illumined, the only life which is really lived, is literature » (slightly adapted translation to better reflect the French original).

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que le mot de « mort » n’ait pas de sens pour lui; situé hors du temps, que pourrait-il craindre de l’avenir?13 There has often been talk of Proust’s Platonism, and this passage is certainly very eloquent in this sense: the contrast between two lives, two writings and two memories literally follows the Platonic contrast between sophistry and dialectics, between the dead word of sophistic logography and the living word of logos and dialectical dialogue, between memory as unfaithful hypnomnesis in sophistry, and memory as a faithful anamnesis of ideas in dialectics. In both Plato and Proust, in this classicist hyperbole, the values of life as opposed to those of death form an axiology that is superior to those of truth and falsehood. In Proust, realistic art is unreal because it is dead, while the book is alive because it is the writing of a life; in Plato, the logos has authority not because it is true, but because it is a living animal, and its truth descends from this presupposed vitality; the truth, in Plato as well as in Proust, belongs to the living discourses “written in a soul” (Phaedrus, 278a) and not to the dead letter of sophistic logography. Also, the dialectic in Plato and the novel in Proust draw their biological and biographical authority from the fact that they can grow in the souls of other people. In Phaedrus, the words of dialectic « are able to help themselves and him who planted them, which are not fruitless, but yield seed from which there spring up in other minds other words capable of continuing the process for ever » (Phaedrus, 276-e277a). This is the book according to Proust: the Search is not dead letter, a sterile diary of a past life, but it is rather a pair of glasses through which future readers will be able to read inside themselves. Car ils ne seraient pas, selon moi, mes lecteurs, mais les propres lecteurs d’eux-mêmes, mon livre n’étant qu’une sorte de ces verres grossissants comme ceux que tendait à un acheteur l’opticien de Combray; mon livre, grâce auquel je leur fournirais le moyen de lire en eux-mêmes. De sorte que je ne leur demanderais pas de me louer ou de me dénigrer, mais seulement de me dire si c’est bien cela, si les mots qu’ils lisent en euxmêmes sont ‘bien ceux que j’ai écrits.14 13

14

iii, 873: « An instant liberated from the order of time has recreated in us man liberated from the same order, so that he should be conscious of it. And indeed we understand his faith in his happiness even if the mere taste of a madeleine does not logically seem to justify it; we understand that the name of death is meaningless to him for, placed beyond Time, how can he fear the future? ». iii, 10335: « For, as I have already shown, they would not be my readers, but the readers of themselves, my book being only a sort of magnifying-glass like those offered by the

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Hypomnesis and anamnesis: two types of repetition, certainly, and two types of writing. But in the first, the writing runs aground on the unfruitful repetition of a past life and a dead memory. Instead, in the second, the repetition accesses the biological and classical register of reproduction and recreation; like any classic, it pre-programs its posterity, entrusting to it the mandate to keep a past life forever alive. This is just like the discourses of the dialectic in Plato, which «  should be considered the speaker’s own legitimate offspring, first the word within himself, if it be found there, and secondly its descendants or brothers which may have sprung up in worthy manner in the souls of ­others » ­(Phaedrus, 278a-b). 3

Structural Anthropology Sans que je m’en rendisse compte, c’était maintenant cette idée de la mort d’Albertine—non plus le souvenir présent de sa vie—qui faisait, pour la plus grande partie, le fond de mes inconscientes songeries, de sorte que si je les interrompais tout à coup pour réfléchir sur moi-même, ce qui me causait de l’étonnement, ce n’était pas comme les premiers jours qu’Albertine si vivante en moi pût n’exister plus sur la terre, mais qu’Albertine, qui n’existait plus sur la terre, qui était morte, fût restée si vivante en moi.15

A book is not simply the resurrection of the past, a life greater than death: as Proust wrote several times, a book is also a large cemetery (and the very image of the Search as a cathedral actually has an ambiguous value, of perenniality but also of transience—the cathedral as a crypt that houses its architect). Albeit imbued with classicism, Proust’s novel does not escape the strongly antithetical pathos of romanticism, as the presence of death and the experience of transience (as we have seen, the whole story between the Narrator and

15

o­ ptician of Combray to a purchaser. So that I should ask neither their praise nor their blame but only that they should tell me if it was right or not, whether the words they were reading within themselves were those I wrote ». iii, 534; The Sweet Cheat Gone: « Without my being precisely aware of it, it was now this idea of Albertine’s death—no longer the present memory of her life—that formed the chief subject of my unconscious musings, with the result that if I interrupted them suddenly to reflect upon myself, what surprised me was not, as in earlier days, that Albertine so living in myself could be no longer existent upon the earth, could be dead, but that Albertine, who no longer existed upon the earth, who was dead, should have remained so living in myself ».

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­ lbertine, defined as “être de fuite” par excellence, draw from the Baudelairian A sonnet A une passante. The same goes for Odette-Charles Swann, or Charlie Morel-Charlus. And the very incipit of the Search can be seen as the experience of a subtraction, of a radical loss—that of the maternal kiss—if not of death. From one end of the Search to the other, from the childhood memories of Combray to the Guermantes matinée, the temporal experience of the Narrator is imbued with transience, haunted by ghosts of all sorts and marked by multiple losses: the loss of all objects of love, the universal alteration of persons and their social roles, and in many points the Narrator’s doubt about his literary abilities, his memory gaps, his compromised health, etc. Here we find an antinomy between the aesthetic theodicy of the novel, which is allegedly able to bring the past back to life, and what the novel actually is about, namely a few temporal ecstasies occurred to the Narrator, immersed in an ocean of transience. But this is an apparent antinomy, which can be solved if we keep in mind the substantial complicity that in Proust binds time lost and time regained, death and life. Indeed, who is resurrected in the work? The particular individuals, the single characters immersed in lost time? Certainly not. Rather, general laws, ideas or archetypes saved from the mortality of empirical and personal destinies. And in this perspective we can recognize the cooperation between the collection of ghosts that haunt the work and the book’s ability to become the resurrection of life. « Il faut que l’herbe pousse et que les enfants meurent ». Moi je dis que la loi cruelle de l’art est que les êtres meurent et que nous-mêmes mourions en épuisant toutes les souffrances, pour que pousse l’herbe non de l’oubli mais de la vie éternelle, l’herbe drue des oeuvres fécondes, sur laquelle le générations viendront faire gaîment, sans souci de ceux qui dorment en dessous, leur « dejeuner sur l’herbe.16 In the previous Chapter, I (as subject) have tried to show how the Search moves along the dual register of the apparent uniqueness of situations, and of their fundamental repetition and generality. To take an evident but not unique example, there are essentially two fundamental series of characters that are repeated with some variations: the male series including the Narrator, Swann, SaintLoup, and Charlus (the series of the Narrator’s ideals and lovers); and the male 16

iii, 1038; Time Regained: « ‘The grass must grow and children die’. I say that the cruel law of art is that beings die and that we ourselves must die after we have exhausted suffering so that the grass, not of oblivion but of eternal life, should grow, fertilised by works upon which generations to come will gaily picnic without care of those who sleep beneath it ».

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series including Odette, Oriane, Albertine, Gilberte, Charlie Morel (the series of fugitives and loved ones). Now, it is the general laws of these series, and not the empirical individuals that embody them, that resurrect in Time Regained. There is no science, if not of the universal; in order for the text to provide a pair of glasses that work for everyone, in which everyone can recognize themselves, it is necessary that we do not get lost in details. The details are lost time, and in fact it is by pursuing a particular, a certain tone of voice, a certain look, that we lose a lot of time, deluding ourselves about the uniqueness of a lover. But lost time is not entirely useless: it acts as a premise and as empirical material for a work that can rediscover the generality of things, collating the various types of lovers and loved ones, the different diplomats, generals, and doctors, the various kinds of mothers (mother, grandmother, but also Saint-Loup’s mother, Charlus’s veneration for his mother and her attitudes towards Charlie), and so on. What is resurrected is not the individual, but a general law. The Search is the rationalization of a principle that was already in place in the Comédie Humaine (for which in Balzac « les types étant […] moins nombreux que les individus, on sent que l’un n’est qu’un des différents noms d’un même type  »).17 And when the first readers of the work compliment the Narrator for his microscopic analysis, Proust points out how wrong they are, because his perspective is rather that of a telescope, of a world seen at great distance with the intention of recognizing the universal laws beyond individual behavior and contingent situations. Aussi fallait-il me résigner, puisque rien ne peut durer qu’en devenant général et si l’esprit meurt à soi-même, à l’idée que même les êtres qui furent les plus chers à l’écrivain n’ont fait en fin de compte que poser pour lui comme chez les peintres.18 It is essentially the principle of a structural anthropology that recognizes universal forms of the human spirit where the somnambulist observation of lost time finds peculiarities, individuality, uniqueness. Is this still an autobiography or a biography? Certainly not, because lives do not resurrect as individualities. This is a cemetery book, in which all the characters die while drawing universal 17 18

M. Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. by P. Clarac and G. Sandre, Gallimard, « Plèiade », Paris 1971, p. 293. iii, 905; Time Regained: «  And I had to resign myself, since nothing can last except by ­becoming general (unless the mind lies to itself) by accepting the idea that even those beings who were dearest to the writer have ultimately only posed to him as to painters ».

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laws. The Narrator himself is half dead in front of his work; the novel, we read, « était pour moi comme un fils dont la mère mourante doit encore s’imposer la fatigue de s’occuper sans cesse, entre les piqûres et les ventouses ».19 (This funerary analogy is very illuminating: the “dying mother” between injections and cuppings, is Proust’s mother, whose death, in the novel, is told in relation to the grandmother). But it is also, undoubtedly, an autobiography. The bloodless shadows of the past rise again not because we bring their bodies back to life, but because we are able to give them meaning. Giving meaning is the creation of spirit. As Deleuze puts it in his work on Proust20: « The act of thinking […] the only true creation. Creation is the genesis of the act of thinking within thought itself […] To think is always to interpret—to explicate, to develop, to translate a sign. Translating, deciphering, developing are the form of pure creation ». (Complicity between lost time and time regained: lost time provides corpses to which the logos, as a living animal, will give back the authentic life they lacked when alive, but in the generality of the spirit). 4

Time Lost and Time Regained

The antagonism, but also the cooperation, between life and death in the Search is probably one of the possible ways to understand the relationship between time regained and time lost. This relationship has often been mistreated by critics, who have generally seen Proust’s novel in two ways. In one view it is regarded as an experience of duration, according to a somewhat Bergsonian model (but then one would not see the necessity of time regained, since the sense of Search would reside in the temporal durée of lost time). In another view, lost time is considered a long nothingness of meanness and deceit, which is then miraculously redeemed by time regained (a hypothesis that essentially goes back to Benjamin, and that has often been extremized with unjustified radicality: in fact, if the whole meaning of the Search lied in time regained, then why dwell so much on lost time? More than three thousand printed pages can certainly not be reduced to the role of preamble or preliminary). Ricoeur has argued that the Search is an experience of temporality that is configured as

19 20

iii, 1041–42: « My work was like a son whose dying mother must still unceasingly labour in the intervals of inoculations and cuppings ». G. Deleuze, Proust and Signs, cit., p. 97.

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an ellipsis, whose focal points are given by lost time and by time regained.21 There is antagonism and antithesis, but also cooperation. The reality and the apparent lives that run through lost time, as well as the ­realistic-cinematographic art that aims to restore them, are undoubtedly lost time, and do not deserve to reach the level of biography and autobiography. On the other hand, Proust’s novel does not seem to do anything more than talk about lost time, and it only announces time regained. But lost time, precisely in its transience, illustrates general laws. Laws of society, for example its tendency to metamorphosis, which is the more surprising and effective the more its immediate appearance is that of immutability; general laws of falling in love, in which the lover dreams of unique loved ones but in fact searches for recurring stereotypes in different people, and so on. Single love affairs and particular traits of social life do not deserve to be saved, because they are pure illusions and a waste of time. And on the other hand, as individuals, loved ones and people of society could not resurrect. Most of them are dead when the Narrator explains his literary project (think of the Narrator’s meeting with Charlus just before the matinée, in which the baron enumerates his dead friends, with a mixture of depression and funeral euphoria); and besides their essence had been fiction, deception, disguise. Therefore, what resurrects are archetypes, the essences mentioned by Proust: the essence of society, the essence of love, to which art gives the form of generality (so that art, knowing how to draw from lost time the universal laws of time regained, turns out to be far from futile and endowed with an authentic truth value). Time regained is therefore not a break with lost time, but its apocalypse, its unveiling and its realization, just as the vitalistic and biological idea of the novel necessarily requires the transience of its characters. But above all, the true redemption of lost time is not entrusted to the pages of Time Regained, but mainly to future readers, who will be able to make use of the general laws handed down by the novel. The autobiography of a person, the vicissitudes of côtés and coteries with which he had to deal, will survive in other people that the Narrator has never met. And yet we also know that in the incessant up and down of presence and wake, oblivion and sleep, by which our temporal being is permeated, the conversation of the soul with itself continues and is always renewed, so that in the end here and there something remains, mneme and anamnesis: when speaking of eros what remains is beauty itself, when speaking 21

P. Ricoeur, Temps et récit. La configuration du temps dans le récit de fiction. Seuil, Paris 1984, pp. 194–225.

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of the ideal city what remains is the “right” itself to which we aim, and this supreme one being is not only removed from every temporal frailty, from the transience of the ephemeral, it is not only beyond all this: it finds its existence in all that is good, just as the animal species only exists in all its specimens. Here we learn that even the word, the logos, only exists if it continually renews itself—indeed, this is even true of the dead letter of what is written: it becomes alive and comes into existence only in the “soul”. Mnemosine is the mother of all muses.22 22

H.G. Gadamer, « In cammino verso la scrittura? », in ii Mulino, n. 300 (1985), pp. 562–574, p. 574.

The Master of the “madeleine” and the Master of the “esprit de Guermantes” 1

Problems with “Marcellism”

Time Regained is strongly anomalous compared to the other volumes of the Search. Widely posthumous (it came out in 1927, five years after Proust’s death), it was not subjected to the process of progressive growth that characterized the rest of the work—or rather, that constitutes the work as we know it, which was born from the complication of a relatively simple scheme. In spite of this, or rather, precisely for these reasons, Time Regained (and especially the long digressions of poetics interspersed in the conclusive Guermantes matinée) constitutes a very ancient phase of the writing of the Search, which was originally conceived as a diptych (lost time / time regained). Therefore, from this point of view, it constitutes the implicit teleology that directs the whole work, which underlies it both as the dissolution of the fictional fable (the matinée in which the Narrator’s artistic vocation is announced), and as an aesthetic and theoretical justification of that vocation. These reflective aspects also point to the fact that Time Regained belongs to a very ancient phase in the drafting of the Proustian novel. Let’s not forget that the Search was born, almost with no interruption, from Contre Sainte-Beuve, the essay-novel in the form of conversations about art and criticism between the Narrator and his mother. This essay migrated into Time Regained, which thus forms (together with Swann) the genetic core of the Search, both from a chronological point of view and, above all, from a poeticideological point of view. (In a letter to Vailette dated August 1909, in which we have the first traces of the transition from Contre Sainte-Beuve to the Search, Proust claims to have now prepared a book that includes a “novel part” of 250– 300 pages and a final essay, “a long conversation about Sainte-Beuve and aesthetics” of 125–175 pages; the whole novel, then, “is nothing but the implementation of the principles of art outlined in this last part, a sort of preface […] put at the end”).1 The double circumstance of an archaic drafting and a failed re-elaboration amply explains the theoretical contradictions of the conclusive part of Time Regained. To stick to the main ones, one fact that immediately springs to mind is that Proust transgresses a basic principle of his poetics (the principle that 1 M. Proust, Correspondance, ed. by P. Kolb, Plon, Paris 1970–1983, 10 vols, vol. ix, pp. 155–157.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004431232_006

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essentially led to the abandonment of the essay-novel project): that a literary work is diminished by the insertion of reflective elements, which are like the price tag left attached to an object (with the aggravating circumstance that if the tag indicates a value, the theory diminishes the intrinsic merits of the literary work). The irony is that these reflexive elements, condemned by the dogma of poésie pure or of the absolute novel, are mostly summoned to justify an ideal of poésie pure—the temporal ecstasies, the madeleines, the resurrections of pure past. In the Search, this ideal does not have the importance that Proust seems to attach to it. In Time Regained we do not find so much the vaunted expression of Proustian poetics, but its initial formulation, the intersection between the essay form of Contre Sainte-Beuve and the aspiration, even more ancient, to write a novel capable of recreating poésie pure (Jean Santeuil). And so, the fact that the conclusion of the work belongs to a remote phase of elaboration of the novel is the reason why it is filled with elements typical of the Proustian ideology, and also explains its cultural reception by generations of readers along the lines of what Barthes has called « marcellism », starting precisely from the insistence on the resurrections of pure time, that is, on the madeleines.2 In this regard it seems legitimate to speak of literary ideology, based on a relatively obvious consideration, namely the low incidence of these madeleines in the actual development of the Proustian novel. Proust undoubtedly cultivated for a long time the project of a narration capable of restoring these moments of pure past, and certainly this ideal constitutes to some extent the triggering cause or the dark impulse of the novel; so much so that madeleines are mentioned in the very early stages of the Search, modeled according to the initial diptych, i.e. in Swann’s Way and, indeed, in Time Regained. Yet the whole development of the novel, according to the process of addition, integration and complication, never makes use of these temporal ecstasies, but instead goes in an opposite sense, that of a phenomenology of behaviors, ­conversations and experience, which has no connection with those sporadic aesthetic-psychological resurrections. I do not necessarily endorse Feuillerat’s thesis,3 by which the Search is the overlap of two layers, one more archaic and aesthetic-psychological (the madeleines, the hawthorns, etc.) and a subsequent one that is predominantly sociological (the phenomenology of spirit of society). However, it seems legitimate to consider madeleines, at least in the context of the literary fabric of the Search as a whole, as largely ornamental elements, or more precisely as literary signals and expressions of empty intentions: on the one hand, in fact, the 2 R. Barthes, Le brouissemente de la langue, Seuil, Paris 1984. 3 A. Feuillerat, Comment M. Proust a composé son roman, Yale U.P., New Haven 1934.

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­ adeleines are inscribed in an unrealizable project of poésie pure and in a sucm cession of unrelated ecstasies; on the other hand, because of the way in which they survive in the Search, these ecstasies now have only the indicative value of « this is poetry ». That is to say that the Narrator communicates to us through them some private experiences, which in his eyes are endowed with a strong aesthetic-psychological pathos—without, on the other hand, giving us the tools to be able to appreciate them (which, moreover, would be positively impossible for reasons immanent to their structure and quality). Which is precisely what does not happen in the rest of the novel, in which we are perfectly able to recognize the general laws that govern the behaviors and words of the characters, and to transfer them to ourselves, effectively making the novel function like a telescope and a pair of glasses. In other words, there is no such thing as a madeleine—burdened as it is by its incommunicability and by its belonging to an era of culture and taste that is not our own— that is worth a single conversation with Aimé (to take one of the minor characters). It is therefore not a question of hypostatizing two Prousts, the Master of the ‘madeleine’ and the Master of the « esprit de Guermantes »,4 but rather to see dialectically in the first the expression of a failed intention, which is fulfilled in an antithetical form and turned upside down in the second. 2

The Failure of Pure Narration

As we have seen, Proust’s work is filled with praise of the involuntary and with condemnation of intelligence as a purely superficial and extrinsic effect with respect to the profound substance of the work of art and of reality. Well, this constitutes a counterpoint with respect to the—Platonic and then ­Hegelian5— thesis of art as sensible appearance of goodness (an appearance, therefore, that is always already destined to its own self-suppression). However, the initial form in which the Proustian apology of the truth value of art is constructed is Platonic, and therefore unconsciously supportive of the prospect of the 4 To use Gianfranco Contini’s expression (Varianti e altra linguistica, Einaudi, Torino 1970, p. 83): contra Feuillerat, Contini does not think that it is legitimate to adopt such a rigid position. 5 « As we have seen, Hegel and the idealists defined the beautiful in art as the sensuous appearance of the Idea, a bold revival of Plato’s insight into the unity of the good and the beautiful. However, to go along with this is to presuppose that truth as it appears in art can be transcended by a philosophy that conceives the Idea as the highest and most appropriate form for grasping truth ». H.-G. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986.

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death of art. Take the Narrator’s self-description when exposed to the shock of the resurrection of pure time: au vrai, l’être qui alors goûtait en moi cette impression la goûtait en ce qu’elle avait de commun dans un jour ancien et maintenant, dans ce qu’elle avait d’extra-temporel, un être qui n’apparaissait que quand, par une de ces identités entre le présent et le passé, il pouvait se trouver dans le seul milieu où il pût vivre, jouir de l’essence des choses, c’est-à-dire en dehors du temps. Cela expliquait que mes inquiétudes au sujet de ma mort eussent cessé au moment où j’avais reconnu inconsciemment le goût de la petite madeleine, puisqu’à ce moment-là l’être que j’avais été était un être extra-temporel, par conséquent insoucieux des vicissitudes de l’avenir.6 In reminiscence one is removed from time, and therefore from death. Here we are already outside the predominantly psychological horizon with which Proust at least initially characterizes the resurrections of pure past (justified through a theory of the association of ideas and an economy of memory, for which it is necessary that the memory remains as much as possible in a potential state and that it should be used as little as possible, because otherwise the associative chains would be confused, just like in voluntary memory, and a memory that is too often evoked would become opaque, associating to itself the various circumstances of its repeated resurrections). The level of Proustian reflection is that of an ontology, which is not exclusively an ontology of the work of art, but of beauty in general: the appearance of beauty, like the unfolding of pure memory, involves a dissolution of the surrounding reality and leads us into an area of reality that is not purely subjective, but rather has an objective consistency superior to the reality of everyday life and voluntary memory. The fact that Proust does not attach this power of resurrection exclusively to art, but to every sensible appearance of beauty is proved for example by Cahier 36.7 In it, a situation of this kind (indeed, the same situation) is not identified 6 iii, 871; Time Regained: «  Of a truth, the being within me which sensed this impression, sensed what it had in common in former days and now, sensed its extra-temporal character, a being which only appeared when through the medium of the identity of present and past, it found itself in the only setting in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is, outside Time. That explained why my apprehensions on the subject of my death had ceased from the moment when I had unconsciously recognised the taste of the little madeleine because at that moment the being that I then had been was an extra-temporal being and in consequence indifferent to the vicissitudes of the future ». 7 On this point, see the previous chapter.

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with regard to memory and reminiscence as sources and themes of the work of art, but in relation to a girl met at a ball (she is the girl with the red rose, the flower-woman in whom one can see Albertine’s aspiration to become a flower, but also Odette, that is, the dame en rose). The beauty of the flower-woman takes us out of time, as much as the ecstasies of pure time brought by reminiscence. More precisely, beauty is reminiscence. Not only in the sense that all the women loved by the Narrator recall other women, referring to a series and a circle; but mainly, in a more specifically and almost technically Platonic context, in the sense that beauty is always the memory of a hyperuranium of happiness and truth, which is evoked in the world through the medium of sensible qualities. « Rien qu’un moment du passé? Beaucoup plus, peut-être; quelque chose qui, commun à la fois au passé et au présent, est beaucoup plus essentiel qu’eux deux ».8 Likewise, in the Platonic Phaedrus, souls contemplate beauty combined with truth and, fallen in time and body, they remember truth through beauty, which is the only link capable of activating a philosophical anamnesis in the form of an ascending dialectic. However, to prevent aesthetic Platonism from immediately resolving into a subordination of sensuous beauty to the idea, and ultimately to intelligence, Proust must block the phases of this ascending dialectic, precisely through the apology of the sensible and the unconscious against intelligence. The first form of apology of the truth value of art in Proust is therefore essentially negative or reactive, as a Platonism of the sensible, whose forms are above all stylistic. It is in this framework, for example, that Proust elaborates the theory of the metaphor as the foundation of artistic creation, precisely because the association of disparate objects carried out by the metaphorical tropism is the literary transposition of the phenomenon of involuntary memory aroused by an association of sensible ideas. On peut faire se succéder indéfiniment dans une description les objets qui figuraient dans le lieu décrit, la vérité ne commencera qu’au moment où l’écrivain prendra deux objets differents, posera leur rapport, analogue dans le monde de l’art à celui qu’est le rapport unique de la loi causale dans le monde de la science, et les enfermera dans les anneaux nécessaires d’un beau style; même, ainsi que la vie, quand, en rapprochant une qualité commune à deux sensations, il dégagera leur essence commune

8 iii, 872; Time Regained, 202: « Nothing but a moment of the past? Much more perhaps; something which being common to the past and the present, is more essential than both ».

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en les réunissant l’une et l’autre pour les soustraire aux contingences du temps, dans une métaphore.9 Style, we read in this same context, is not a question of technique but of ­vision—where, however, the vision has nothing to do with the theory, but only with sensibility. Non que ces idées que nous formons ne puissent être justes logiquement, mais nous ne savons pas si elles sont vraies. Seule l’impression, si chétive qu’en semble la matière, si insaisissable la trace, est un critérium de vérité, et à cause de cela mérite seule d’être appréhendée par l’esprit, car elle est seule capable, s’il sait en dégager cette vérité, de l’amener à une plus grande perfection et de lui donner une pure joie. L’impression est pour l’écrivain ce qu’est l’expérimentation pour le savant, avec cette différence que chez le savant le travail de l’intelligence précède i et chez l’écrivain vient après.10 Car, mû par l’instinct qui était en lui, l’écrivain, bien avant qu’il crût le devenir un jour, omettait régulièrement de regarder tant de choses que les autres remarquent, ce qui le faisait accuser, par les autres de distraction, et par lui-même de ne savoir ni écouter ni voir, mais pendant ce temps-là il dictait à ses yeux et à ses oreilles de retenir à jamais ce qui semblait aux autres des riens puérils, l’accent avec lequel avait été dite une phrase, et l’air de figure et le mouvement d’épaules qu’avait fait à un certain moment telle personne dont il ne sait peut-être rien d’autre, il y a de cela bien des années, et cela parce que cet accent, il l’avait déjà entendu, ou sentait qu’il pourrait le réentendre, que c’était quelque chose de renouvelable, de durable; c’est le sentiment du général qui, dans 9

10

iii, 889: « In describing objects one can make those which figure in a particular place succeed each other indefinitely; the truth will only begin to emerge from the moment that the writer takes two different objects, posits their relationship, the analogue in the world of art to the only relationship of causal law in the world of science, and encloses it within the circle of fine style. In this, as in life, he fuses a quality common to two sensations, extracts their essence and in order to withdraw them from the contingencies of time, unites them in a metaphor ». iii, 880: « It is not that the ideas we formulate may not be logically right but that we do not know if they are true. Intuition alone, however tenuous its consistency, however improbable its shape, is a criterion of truth and, for that reason, deserves to be accepted by the mind because it alone is capable, if the mind can extract that truth, of bringing it to greater perfection and of giving it pleasure without alloy. Intuition for the writer is what experiment is for the learned, with the difference that in the case of the learned the work of the intelligence precedes and in the case of the writer it follows ».

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l’écrivain futur, choisit lui-même ce qui est général et pourra entrer dans l’oeuvre d’art. Car il n’a écouté les autres que quand, si bêtes ou si fous qu’ils fussent, répétant comme des perroquets ce que disent les gens de caractère semblable, ils s’étaient faits par là même les oiseaux prophètes, les porte-parole d’une loi psychologique. Il ne se souvient que du général. Par de tels accents, par de tels mouvements de physionomie, eussent-ils été vus dans sa plus lointaine enfance, la vie des autres était représentée en lui et, quand plus tard il écrirait, viendrait composer d’un mouvement d’épaules commun à beaucoup, vrai comme s’il était noté sur le cahier d’un anatomiste, mais ici pour exprimer une vérité psychologique, et ­emmanchant sur ses épaules un mouvement de cou fait par un autre, chacun ayant donné son instant de pose.11 Now, it is indisputable that the purpose of the Search is the definition of these pure affects, of the unconscious movements betraying a truth that overcomes intelligence and goes beyond the external and conscious characterizations of individuals. The sense of the universal and the legislative character of the work of art, by the virtue of which it can rival science, is precisely the ability to recognize a certain number of simple affections behind a parade of masks and identities. Only, it is not through the ecstasies of madeleines that these affections can come to light, but through a serial and narrative process that has nothing ecstatic about it. 11

iii, 900: « For, owing to his instinct, the writer long before he knew he was going to be one, habitually avoided looking at all sorts of things other people noticed, and was, in consequence, accused by others of absent-mindedness and by himself of being incapable of attention and observation, while all the time he was ordering his eyes and his ears to retain for ever what to others seemed puerile, the tone in which a phrase had been uttered, the facial expression and movement of the shoulders of a particular person at a particular moment perhaps years ago, who was otherwise unknown to him, and this because he had heard that tone before or felt he might hear it again, that it was a recurrent and permanent characteristic. It is the feeling for the general in the potential writer, which selects material suitable to a work of art because of its generality. He only pays attention to others, however dull and tiresome, because in repeating what their kind say like parrots, they are for that very reason prophetic birds, spokesmen of a psychological law. He recalls only what is general. Through certain ways of speaking, through a certain play of features and through certain movements of the shoulders even though they had been seen when he was a child, the life of others remains within himself and when later on he begins writing, that life will help to recreate reality, possibly by the use of that movement of the shoulders common to many people. This movement is as true to life as though it had been noted by an anatomist, but the writer expresses thereby a psychological verity by grafting on to the shoulders of one individual the neck of another, both of whom had only posed to him for a moment ».

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This is precisely the reason why the apology of madeleines appears only in the most ancient phases of the Search, in which Proust had not yet abandoned the project of a pure novel, as a succession of privileged ecstasies, which already underlined the aesthetic program of the unfinished novel preceding the Search, namely Jean Santeuil. As Maurice Blanchot notes,12 Jean Santeuil contained the description of an experience identical to that of the madeleine: while walking not far from Lake Geneva, Jean Santeuil recognizes, «  with a thrill of happiness » the sea at Bergmeil, (which would become Balbec), and decides « henceforth to write only in order to make such moments come to life again, or to respond to the inspiration that this transport of joy gives him ». « And this—comments Blanchot—is impressive. Almost all the experience of Le temps perdu [Lost time] can be found here: the phenomenon of reminiscence, the metamorphosis it presages (transmutation of the past into the present), the feeling that there is here a door open onto the domain unique to the imagination, and finally the resolution to write in light of such moments and to bring them back to light. One could naïvely wonder, then: how is it that Proust, who from that moment on holds the key to his art, writes only Jean Santeuil and not his actual work-and, in this sense, continues not to write? ».13 On the one hand, Blanchot believes that the reason for this lies in the thin literary mediation between the real Proust and the Narrator. Which may be true or false, but says very little except for a very general truth: that before coming to the Search, Proust went through ascesis, which in literature is usually a process of mediation. But what really lies at the root of Proust’s failure—which however does not only invest, as Blanchot seems to think, the youthful unfinished work, but also the oldest part of the Search—is precisely the failure of pure narrative. «  It seems that Proust has conceived of a purer art, concentrated on moments alone, without padding, without summoning voluntary memories or general truths formed or grasped again by intelligence, to which later on he will think he has accorded a large place in his work ».14 The same thing happens in another passage of Jean Santeuil, quoted by Blanchot: « ‘For the pleasure that it [the imagination] gives us is a sign of the superiority, which I trust enough to write nothing of what I saw, of what I thought, of what I reasoned, of what I remembered, to write only when a past instant was suddenly brought to life again in a smell, in a sight that it caused to burst forth and above which palpitated the imagination, and only when this joy gave me inspiration. […]’ Can I calI this book a novel? It is less, perhaps, and much more, the 12 13 14

M. Blanchot, The Book to Come, cit. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 19.

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­ nadulterated essence of my gathered life, pouring out of those wrenching u hours. The book was never made, it was harvested ».15 The failure of pure narrative then brings out a « demand for deepening », which allows Proust to « introduce the most ‘impure’ materials, those ‘truths relative to passions, to ­characters, to customs’, but which in reality he does not introduce as ‘truths’, stable and immobile assertions, but as that which never stops developing, progressing by a slow movement of envelopment ».16 These impure moments, initially introduced as a simple connective tissue—like the gangue that envelops and enables an ideal of poésie pure that, if taken in an absolute sense, is ­unachievable—will end up assuming a predominant role in the literary meaning of the Search and in the claim of the truth value of the work of art. 3

Secondary Rehabilitation of Intelligence

We have seen how Proust condemned intelligence, opposing it to art (as sensibility, obscure instinct, etc.): les vérités que l’intelligence saisit directement à claire-voie dans le monde de la pleine lumière ont quelque chose de moins profond, de moins nécessaire que celles que la vie nous a malgré nous communiquées en une impression, matérielle parce qu’elle est entrée par nos sens, mais dont nous pouvons dégager l’esprit.17 This is in line with the general assumptions of Proust’s poetics and metaphysics. But there is no pure book made of pure moments and pure time: for this reason we witness the rehabilitation of intelligence, although placed in a vicarious function. So a few pages later, we find the phrase now quoted repeated, but here intelligence does not only discover truths of a “less profound” type— perhaps it captures something more. Quant aux vérités que l’intelligence—même des plus hauts esprits— cueille à claire-voie, devant elle, en pleine lumière, leur valeur peut être très grande; mais elles ont des contours plus secs et sont planes, n’ont pas 15 16 17

Ibid., p. 19–20. Ibid., p. 22. iii, 878; Time Regained: « the truths which the intelligence apprehends through direct and clear vision in the daylight world are less profound and less necessary than those which life has communicated to us unconsciously through an intuition which is material only in so far as it reaches us through our senses and the spirit of which we can elicit ».

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de profondeur parce qu’il n’y a pas eu de profondeurs à franchir pour les atteindre, parce qu’elles n’ont pas été recréées. […] Je sentais pourtant que ces vérités que l’intelligence dégage directement de la réalité ne sont pas à dédaigner entièrement, car elles pourraient enchâsser d’une matière moins pure, mais encore pénétrée d’esprit, ces impressions que nous apporte hors du temps l’essence commune aux sensations du passé et du présent, mais qui, plus précieuses, sont aussi trop rares pour que l’œuvre d’art puisse être composée seulement avec elles.18 Here intelligence plays the role of an excipient, linking the deep truths, spreading the connective tissue of a narrative that cannot be a pure novel. But is it really just an excipient? One would say it isn’t. On closer inspection, the truths of intelligence allow for those anthropological, psychological and sociological observations, those descriptions of human types and groups in which ­probably—much more than in the relationship with pure memory and with nature as an aesthetic absolute—lies the novelistic strength of the Search. Capables d’êtres utilisées pour cela, je sentais se presser en moi une foule de vérités relatives aux passions, aux caractères, aux mœurs. Chaque personne qui nous fait souffrir peut être rattachée par nous à une divinité dont elle n’est qu’un reflet fragmentaire et le dernier degré, divinité (Idée) dont la contemplation nous donne aussitôt de la joie au lieu de la peine que nous avions. Tout l’art de vivre, c’est de ne nous servir des personnes qui nous font souffrir que comme d’un degré permettant d’accéder à leur forme divine et de peupler ainsi joyeusement notre vie de divinités.19

18

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iii, 898: « As to the verities which the intellect—even of highly endowed minds—gathers in the open road, in full daylight their value can be very great; but those verities have rigid outlines and are flat, they have no depth because no depths have been sounded to reach them—they have not been recreated. […]. Nevertheless, I felt that the truths the intellect extracts from immediate reality are not to be despised for they might enshrine, with matter less pure but, nevertheless, vitalised by the mind, intuitions the essence of which, being common to past and present, carries us beyond time, but which are too rare and precious to be the only elements in a work of art ». iii, 898–899: « I felt a mass of truths pressing on my notice, relative to passions, characters and habits which could be thus used. We can, perhaps, attach every creature who has caused us unhappiness to a divinity of which she is only the most fragmentary reflection, a divinity the contemplation of whom in the realm of idea will give us immediate happiness instead of our former pain. The whole art of living is to regard people who cause us

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Those anthropological and sociological descriptions have an only indirect connection with the higher truths of art. But this is indeed how lost time is regained. In the light of the illuminations of the pure past, we do not know what to do with all the time spent in life, which appears to be truly lost; but it is not so in the light, certainly drier and less alive, of intelligence, which has an economic function of recovery of time lost in its substantial frivolity. Alors, moins éclatante sans doute que celle qui m’avait fait apercevoir que l’œuvre d’art était le seul moyen de retrouver le Temps perdu, une nouvelle lumière se fit en moi. Et je compris que tous ces matériaux de l’œuvre littéraire, c’était ma vie passée; je compris qu’ils étaient venus à moi, dans les plaisirs frivoles, dans la paresse, dans la tendresse, dans la douleur, emmagasinés par moi, sans que je devinasse plus leur destination, leur survivance même, que la graine mettant en réserve tous les aliments qui nourriront la plante.20 How does this economic recovery take place? Let’s follow the metaphor of the seed, which a few pages later brings out what we have previously defined as Proust’s Aristotelianism, namely the idea that art, through the iteration of similar events, actually becomes more philosophical than history, because it captures the universal, thus made available for other readers. Ainsi mon amour pour Albertine, tant qu’il en différât, était déjà inscrit dans mon amour pour Gilberte, au milieu des jours heureux duquel j’avais entendu pour la première fois prononcer le nom et faire le portrait d’Albertine par sa tante, sans me douter que ce germe insignifiant se développerait et s’étendrait un jour sur toute ma vie. Mais à un autre point de vue, l’œuvre est signe de bonheur, parce qu’elle nous apprend que dans tout amour le général gît à côté du particulier, et à passer du second au premier par une gymnastique qui fortifie contre le chagrin en faisant négliger sa cause pour approfondir son ­essence. […]. Certes, nous sommes obligé de revivre notre souffrance

20

suffering as, in a degree, enabling us to accept its divine form and thus to populate our daily life with divinities ». iii, 899; Time Regained: « Then a new light arose in me, less brilliant indeed than the one that had made me perceive that a work of art is the only means of regaining lost time. And I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant ».

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­ articulière avec le courage du médecin qui recommence sur lui-même p la dangereuse piqûre. Mais en même temps il nous faut la penser sous une forme générale qui nous fait dans une certaine mesure échapper à son étreinte, qui fait de tous les copartageants de notre peine, et qui n’est même pas exempte d’une certaine joie. Là où la vie emmure, l’intelligence perce une issue, car s’il n’est pas de remède à un amour non partagé, on sort de la constatation d’une souffrance, ne fût-ce qu’en en tirant les conséquences qu’elle comporte. L’intelligence ne connaît pas ces situations fermées de la vie sans issue. Aussi fallait-il me résigner, puisque rien ne peut durer qu’en devenant général.21 There is no such thing as pure sensation and pure idea—nor can there be. This is for structural reasons (which are those reported by Blanchot): the novel would otherwise resolve itself into a pure succession of unrelated impressions, unable to communicate to the reader the Narrator’s private experiences; hence the need to introduce a universal element through the iteration and mimesis of particular situations capable of inducing an identification and, through it, a catharsis. But above all, the idea of a succession of pure sensations, devaluing the narrative, carries out a very similar operation, although shifted from the intellect to the imagination: i.e. the reduction of art to a sensible manifestation of the idea—the basis of the Hegelian observation that art is a thing of the past, whence the death of art. Thus, it is not in the sense of the death of art, but precisely in that of its gnoseological survival, that one should understand the Proustian abandonment of the poésie pure.

21

iii, 904–905: « Thus my love for Albertine and the degree in which it differed was already engrossed in my love for Gilberte in the midst of those joyous days when for the first time I heard Albertine’s name mentioned by her aunt, without suspecting that that insignificant germ would one day develop and spread over my whole life. But from another point of view, work is an emblem of happiness because it teaches us that in all love the general has its being close beside the particular and passes from the second to the first by a gymnastic which strengthens the writer against sorrow through making him pass over its cause in order to probe to its essence. […]. Certainly we are obliged to relive our particular suffering with the courage of a physician who tries over again upon himself an experiment with a dangerous serum. But we ought to think of it under a general form which enables us to some extent to escape from its control by making all men co-partners in our sorrow and this is not devoid of a certain gratification. Where life closes round us, intelligence pierces an egress, for if there is no remedy for unrequited love, one emerges from the verification of suffering if only by drawing its relevant conclusions. The intellect does not recognise situations in life which have no issue. And I had to resign myself, since nothing can last except by becoming general ».

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Proust was probably never fully conscious of this situation. Certainly the pars destruens of his aesthetics, that is, the critique of realism and popular and patriotic art, takes into account the fact that on the level of reality qua phenomenology of the historical world art seems inferior and insufficient, as it is surpassed by the science of nature of the spirit. Moreover, his rejection of ideological art is fully aware of the limits imposed on art by Hegelian aesthetics, because such art fully shows the subordination of art to the idea, and therefore to philosophy. We understand why, in Deleuze’s interpretation, Proust wants to compete with philosophy. But not only in the sense understood by Deleuze in the framework of a hermeneutics of suspicion, for which against philosophy as dialogue, disinterested knowledge and good will to understand the other, Proust would set the experience of the unconscious, of obscure wills, of love, of jealousy and of lies as ways through which truth is not said, but betrayed. Indeed, this polemic against philosophy also has a pars construens: philosophy not only neglects the role of interest in knowledge, but it also subordinates the finite and opaque experience of narrating to the reflective transparency of the idea. This pars construens, which is not theoretically discussed by Proust, is however the substance of the novel, the narrative depth given to the Search by its repeated complications and anecdotal accretions that progressively envelop the inert paintings of the pure novel made of absolute sensations. And it is precisely in its narrative that the Search accesses its speculative pointe. What do I mean by “speculative”? A first interpretation is the one that was made canonical by romantic art in its most intensely aestheticizing points. When the truths of history and nature are entirely left to the idea that goes beyond the sensible appearance of aesthetics, i.e. when science is entrusted with the task of providing an accurate description of the world and a conformal mirror of external reality, poetry and the arts generally start to reflect on themselves, on their language and on their own conditions of possibility. Indeed it is the ideal of poésie pure as a self-reflection that paradigmatically marks the common thread that unites Flaubert’s project of a book on nothing, Mallarmé’s idea that “tout le monde existe pour aboutir à un livre” (self-­ reflexive: which is therefore not a mirror of nature), and Valery’s principle according to which the literary word, unlike ordinary language and the language of science, is not paper money that vanishes in front of its reference (its gold value), but rather is itself gold value, i.e. it finds in itself, self-reflexively, the principle of its validity. Proust is certainly following this guiding principle in his rejection of realistic, popular or patriotic art: here the Proustian poetics is in line with the Baudelairian and Flaubertian models for which a dandy only speaks to the people to deride them (Fusées), or by which the encyclopaedic circumnavigation of all human knowledge, from philosophy to the ­comparative

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­ istory of religions to gardening, demonstrates « the powerlessness of effort, h the vanity of affirmation, and the ever eternal misery of everything » (according to Maupassant’s famous expression about Bouvard et Pécuchet). But on the other hand, a principle of this kind, if emphasized in terms of poetics, does not support the claim of the truth of art, but simply excludes art’s illegitimate claims. And so, in contemporary poetics and aesthetics, the assumption of this  principle has systematically meant a purely negative assertion: that according to which art has no meaning, unlike referential and descriptive forms of language. Now, inserting truths « relative to passions, characters and habits » does not contradict the ideal of poésie pure as speculative art, but rather brings it to completion by subtracting it from the restricted domain of art as the Sunday of life—therefore as a transitory feast and, once again and essentially more than ever, as a thing of the past. Let us not forget that Proust attached a legislative and cognitive value to his work; these values, however, do not exclude the speculative nature of language, but develop it in its hermeneutical consequences. Certainly the literary work must not act as a mirror of external reality; rather, speculatively, it must reflect on itself. But this does not mean that the work should not try to say anything. Rather, it means that, as index sui, the literary work assumes a canonical value, that is to say it establishes a world that did not exist before it, and in which future readers will be able to recognize themselves. This was already the experience of the work of art as mimesis in Aristotle: not a simple imitation of nature, nor (let alone) an imitation of classical examples, as it would be understood in the poetics of classicism, but rather the definition of the universals of human action, of which, before they set themselves to work in tragedy, there was no reflective consciousness. This experience of the canonicity of texts far exceeds the restricted scope of aesthetics, at least in its romantic and post-romantic meaning. What is canonical, in the sense of institutional and speculative, is not only the literary word, but every type of word that (like for example in law and religion, which for this reason are, together with literature, the traditional resources and the fields of exercise of hermeneutics) is presented as index sui without waiting for the suffrage of a correspondence with an external reality. What does a legal text “describe”? Nothing but itself, and through this self-reflection, which is not at all a lack of meaning, the code fulfills a guiding and canonical function equal to that of literature. It is through this path that « marcellism » can be recovered. However, the latter should not be understood as the emphasis on the madeleines, but rather in the sense that the Search, thanks to the encyclopaedic depth it reached through its progressive integrations, has taken on a canonical and normative value. This is why Swann, Charlus, Albertine, etc. end up taking

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on the role of highly stylized and universal types: the Search as index sui becomes not the description, but the legislative institution of universal principles, such as « the same angers, the same sorrows, the same boasts, the same manias » that Proust records in his phenomenology of the spirit of society. This experience of the canonicity of the texts exercises and thematizes the speculative value of the work of art, not in the sense of the self-reflexivity of a lack of meaning, but in that of the possibility of creating a world that did not exist before the work of art itself. And this indeed is what underlies the apology of the claim of truth of art in hermeneutics. Thus, for example, in The Origin of the Work of Art (1935–36) Heidegger declares the superiority of art to science not by appealing to ineffable principles, but rather by putting the “setting itself to work” of truth in art in communication with other experiences of canonicity, such as morality, religion, politics—and also philosophy as a speculative philosophy, which no longer claims to describe the world, but rather acquires a performative, canonical and institutional value. Starting from these elements we could undertake a hermeneutical rereading of Proust, which in these essays I have only sketched.

Like Giants Immersed in Time: Ontology, Phenomenology, and Marcel Proust 1

It No Longer Exists but I Can Perceive It1 Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand. It is a long time, too, since my father has been able to say to Mamma: “Go along with the child.” Never again will such moments be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. In reality their echo has never ceased; and it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them anew, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the street that one would suppose them to have stopped, until they ring out again through the silent evening air. (Proust 1913–1927: 49–50)

As evidenced by the two phrases we have italicized, this passage from Swann’s Way contains two opposing elements. On the one hand, Proust tells us that the world of his childhood no longer exists, on the other he claims to be able to perceive it. Given that perception is a factive mental state, which implies the existence of its objects, perceiving «  the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma » signifies the existence of those sobs. This seems to contradict the previous statement that « The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago ­demolished  »—unless a child’s sobs have a more robust ontological status than a stairway, which seems implausible. The philosophical significance of this literary contradiction has been analyzed by Emanuele Lago (2005) in his essay La volontà di potenza e il passato 1 This chapter was written by Maurizio Ferraris and Enrico Terrone.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004431232_007

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[The Will to Power and the Past], in the chapter entitled « Proust, Nietzsche, Gentile, and the impossibility of the will to power ». First of all, Lago highlights Proust’s contradiction: « By arguing that the past continues to be perceived, does not Proust (like the Western speculative tradition to which he refers) fall into the most obvious contradiction? Is he not saying that the thing ceases and yet does not cease to exist, that it is annulled (because it passes) and yet is not annulled (because it continues to be perceived)? » (2005: 261). Secondly, Lago focuses on the strategy that Proust uses to solve this contradiction. This strategy consists in giving memory the task of making the perception of the past possible by guaranteeing its being. This presupposes an “idealist” conception of the relationship between memory and the past, by which the being of the latter depends on the thinking subject and her memory: « This conception of memory as unconscious survival of the past is the way in which Proust, in the wake of Bergson, expresses the fundamental meaning of memory in the Western tradition. It is essentially a way to preserve what exists and keep it in the sphere of being, saving it from the robbery of nothingness » (Ivi: 264). In this way, the past « remains in the depths of the soul (those depths that are for the artist to probe) » (Ivi: 267). However, according to Lago, Proust’s solution is contradictory: on the one hand, the past preserved by memory is subtracted from the flow of becoming; on the other hand, the past, as being in time, has the essential characteristic of becoming—of passing from being to nothing—otherwise there would be no need for memory to preserve it. That is to say, the past has the essential characteristic of becoming, but memory preserves the past without this essential characteristic; therefore memory does not really preserve the past. Lago’s conclusion is that in order to solve this problem it is necessary to dismiss Proust and turn instead to Gentile and Nietzsche, two philosophers well aware that « the evidence of becoming is necessarily connected with the idea that nothing may exist outside of its relationship with it. » (p. 268). From this principle, however, Gentile and Nietzsche draw opposite consequences. Gentile claims that the past is unreal, and therefore it is impossible to experience it through memory, which instead « creates it from scratch » (Ivi: 270). Thus, the moderate idealism that Lago attributes to Proust (for which memory preserves the past) gives way to Gentile’s radical idealism (for which memory creates the past). Nietzsche’s solution instead consists in affirming that the past continues to become independently of memory; what makes this possible is the eternal return, such that: « every moment (every configuration of the world) is the identical recreation of the most remote past » (Ivi: 283). This solution can be seen as a kind of prodigal realism, in the sense that it affirms the

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reality of the past (which is why it is a form of realism), but it does so by multiplying events at will (which is why it is prodigal). In what follows, we will argue that there is another strategy to solve the Proustian contradiction between the alleged nonexistence of the past and the fact that it can be experienced. This strategy does not require resorting to either Gentile or Nietzsche; it does not oblige us to endorse either the radical idealism of the former or the prodigal realism of the latter. Proust’s contradiction can in fact be addressed and resolved within Proust’s very text. To this end, however, we need to move from the beginning of In Search of Lost Time to its final volume, Time Regained, where the Proustian conception of the past clearly turns out to be realistic rather than idealistic. In fact, for Proust, the past continues to exist independently of memory, which simply experiences it in a manner similar to that in which perception experiences the present. This form of realism about the past is quite distinct from the Nietzschean eternal return, for which the past continues to exist, repeating itself endlessly. In Proust’s perspective, one occurrence alone is sufficient for a past event to exist eternally. This is the conception of time that, in contemporary philosophy, goes under the name of four-dimensionalism. 2 Ontology In Search of Lost Time has been the object of various philosophical readings, both on the “analytic” side (for instance, Bonomi 1987) and on the “continental” side (for instance, Deleuze 1964). Here, we intend to read it as a philosophical Bildungsroman in which one learns a new way of looking at things, a new modality to experience time. From this point of view, the passage from lost time to time regained is not a change in the nature of time itself, but in the way we experience it. Time remains there, where it has always been. It was lost because one was no longer able to see it; it is regained when one finds a way to see it again: « like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the street that one would suppose them to have stopped, until they ring out again through the silent evening air ». The bells do not actually resume playing; they never stopped, yet one did not know how to listen to them. Similarly, the past does not return to reality; it has always been real, yet one was no longer able to see it. When one learns to see it again, time is regained. This reading of In Search of Lost Time can be clarified by using the theoretical tools made available by the debate on time and the experience of time in

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contemporary philosophy. In accordance with the image of the world derived from Einstein’s theory of relativity, philosophers such as Quine (1987), Mellor (1998), Varzi (2001) and Sider (2011) conceive of time as a fourth spatial dimension, and therefore only consider the notions of precedence between temporal instants along this dimension. Instead, for them, the characteristics of past, present or future that are usually attributed to the temporal instants in the manifest image of the world are simple subjective appearances. Let us call “Einsteinian image” the image of the world endorsed by these philosophers. Borrowing McTaggart’s (1908) terminology, the Einsteinian image involves a B-theory of time, which attributes reality only to temporal relations of precedence between instants; instead, an A-theory of time also attributes reality to the properties of ‘being past’, ‘being present’ or ‘being future’, which can be attributed to individual instants. Moreover, the Einsteinian image is eternalist because the existence of something does not depend on its temporal position; instead, according to the presentist conception, only that which enjoys the property of being present exists. Finally, the Einsteinian image is four-­ dimensionalist, because it conceives of concrete objects as extended not only in space but also in time; instead, according to a three-dimensionalist conception, objects are essentially spatial and therefore three-dimensional: they do not extend in time, but rather change over time. Thus, according to three-­ dimensionalism, an object cannot be wholly present at a single point in time whereas, according to four-dimensionalism, the object fills time with its temporal parts just as it fills space with its spatial parts. The conception of time that emerges from In Search of Lost Time surely is four-dimensionalist, even though it does not explicitly endorse a B-theory of time or eternalism. Consider how the Narrator describes Combray’s church : « an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four dimensional space—the name of the fourth being Time » (Proust 1913–1927: 66). Or consider the ending passage in which the Narrator sees the participants in the Guermantes matinée as « giants immersed in time  » (ivi: 1012), whose appearance is the visible, three-­ dimensional part of a four-dimensional body that has its roots in the past. This is Proust’s four-dimensionalism, which, in the domain of literary studies, has been nicely highlighted by Richard Durán (1991) in his paper Fourth-­ Dimensional Time and Proust’s ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’. In principle, four-dimensionalism does not necessarily imply that the present lacks reality and all moments, past, present and future, exist all together in a single eternal whole. That is to say that four-dimensionalism does not per se imply the B-theory of time and eternalism. There are two main options in this regard. If one supports the A-theory together with eternalism and

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f­ our-dimensionalism, one is endorsing a moving spotlight theory (see Cameron 2015). According to this view, the universe exists as an eternal four-dimensional block, but inside it there is a privileged moment, the present, which moves along the temporal dimension of the four-dimensional block as if there were a moving spotlight illuminating the various instants one at a time. If instead one maintains the A-theory and four-dimensionalism, but not eternalism, one is endorsing a growing block theory (see Broad 1923), for which the four-­ dimensional universe is built as the bar of the present moves forward from the past to the future. The four-dimensional conception of reality, in principle, is compatible with both moving spotlight theory and growing block theory. It is instead incompatible with presentism, the thesis that only what is present exists. In fact, presentism involves not only the adoption of the A-theory (otherwise the notion of present would have no ontological relevance) but also the rejection of fourdimensionalism (because if only the present exists, then—given that the present is point-like—there can be no four-dimensional entities). If one endorses presentism, three-dimensionalism is the only choice, and from that perspective Proust’s statement that « the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s presence » have never ceased reveals itself to be nothing more than a poetic metaphor; the sobs, belonging to the past, have ceased a long time ago, because only the present really exists. If one wants to treat these sobs as truly real, four-dimensionalism is the only available option. 3

Phenomenology and Epistemology

A point in favor of three-dimensionalism seems to be its conformity with the phenomenology and epistemology of ordinary experience. If we look around, we see three-dimensional objects, not four-dimensional ones. So, three-­ dimensionalism can take perceptual experience at face value, while four-­ dimensionalism seems forced to provide an « error theory » (cf. Mackie 1977), that is, an explanation of why we perceive three-dimensional objects if in reality the world is made up of four-dimensional entities. As we will see, Proust offers us an alternative to this error theory: the point is not to explain why our perception is wrong, but rather to make it truthful, enriching it with the contribution of memory. But before proceeding to analyze the Proustian solution, let us try to clarify the scope of the problem. To this end, consider Peter Strawson’s criticism of four-dimensionalism in his book Individuals:

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So some philosophers have reasoned, making their point by saying, for example, that ‘Caesar’ is the name of a series of events, a biography. In so reasoning, they may be said to draw attention to the possibility of our recognizing a category of objects which we do not in fact recognize: a category of four-dimensional objects, which might be called ‘processthings’, and of which each of the temporally successive parts is three-­ dimensional, is, as it were, the thing taken at successive stages of its history from the beginning to the end. But the way in which I have to describe these objects shows that they are not to be identified either with the processes which things undergo or with the things which undergo them. I remarked earlier that I was concerned to investigate the relations of identifiability-dependence between the available major categories, the categories we actually possess; and the category of process-things is one we neither have nor need. (1959: 56–57) There is something puzzling in this argument. Why does Strawson presuppose that we lack the category of process-things? This is not very clear. Consider the individual we are referring to when we say, for example, “Socrates was a wise man”. What metaphysical category does he belong to? It is not obvious whether we are speaking of a three-dimensional thing (like a body) or of a processthing (like a biography, a whole life). In fact, Strawson’s point seems to be that one cannot perceive process-things. One only perceives three-dimensional objects. Therefore, one can only i­ dentify and recognize (and speak of) three-dimensional objects, not process-things. Still, one does not need to perceive an object in its entirety in order to identify it. One can identify an object by simply perceiving a spatial part of it. As Alva Noë (2006) pointed out, one experiences a tomato as a voluminous ovoid even though one only sees one side of it. Perception rests upon “synecdoches”, i.e. parts standing for a whole. We can draw on this to establish an experiential  analogy between the experience of space and that of time. As a two-­ dimensional facet can stand for a three-dimensional spatial whole, so a threedimensional “facet” can stand for a four-dimensional spatiotemporal whole. In this sense, the temporal dimension of a four-dimensional entity is a sort of hidden depth. This leads us to a significant experiential analogy between space and time: just as one has access to objective space (which can be represented by a map) by experiencing egocentric perspectival space (centered in the place where our body is), one also has access to objective time (which can be represented by a calendar) by experiencing egocentric perspectival time (centered in the time at which our perception occurs).

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However, there is also a significant experiential disanalogy between space and time. As Merleau-Ponty (1962: 94) observed, « I know that objects have several facets because I could make a tour of inspection of them », and yet one cannot make a tour of inspection of a four-dimensional entity. Nevertheless, one can experience further temporal facets of such a four-­ dimensional entity by means of memory. Surely, in terms of pure perception, one can only have temporal experience of three-dimensional objects. Yet temporal experience is rarely, if ever, pure perception: it is rather a combination of perception and memory. This becomes evident in memory-based (or retention-based) accounts of temporal experience offered by philosophers such as Augustine, Kant, Brentano, Husserl, James, or Bergson. An interesting example in this sense the experience of a musical interval, say, C-E. This experience results from the conjunction of the very recent memory of C with the current perception of E. In Brentano’s terms, this experience has two components, namely, aesthesis, which represents-as-present E, and proter-aesthesis, which represents-as-recent-past C (cf. Kriegel 2015). Musical intervals, qua sounds, are paradigmatic process-things. One does not experience sounds as wholly present entities that can last over time or change, but rather as entities made up of temporal parts. As David Velleman (2006: 13) put it, a sound « doesn’t move with respect to time; it merely extends newer and newer temporal parts to fill each successive moment  ». Four-­ dimensionalism can be seen as the ontological claim that all thighs exist in the way sounds exist. In other words, all things are process-things, which, as Proust puts it « are larger than the moment in which they occur and cannot be entirely contained in it » (1913–1927: 408). The experience of process-things relies on the experiential component in between perception and memory, which Brentano—as seen above—calls ‘proter-aesthesis’, and Husserl ‘adumbration’. Interestingly, Husserl uses this term to indicate not only the retention of a previous temporal state, but also the perception of a spatial facet of a concrete object. For what concerns adumbrations in the temporal dimension, he observes: « The past must be represented in this now as past, and this is accomplished through the continuity of adumbrations that in one direction terminates in the sensation-point and in the other direction becomes blurred and indeterminate » (1991: 290). In a similar vein, James introduces the notion of a « specious present », which he characterizes in the following terms: « We seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with its two ends embedded in it » (1890: 574). Drawing on these insights on temporal experience, we can conceive of memory as a way of extending « the interval of time as a whole ». That is to say that memory is as a way of looking beyond the point that « becomes blurred and indeterminate  » in perception and retention. This brings us to the

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e­ pistemological view called direct realism, according to which remembering involves a direct relation to what exists in the past (cf. Bergson 1896, Russell 1912), just as perceiving involves a direct relation to what exists in the present (cf. Strawson 1979, Snowdon 1998). A direct relation, unlike a representation, entails the existence of both its relata, namely, the mental state of perceiving or remembering on the one hand, and what is perceived or remembered on the other. According to canonical direct realism about perception, by perceiving we enjoy a direct relation to three-dimensional objects. But what parts of reality are we related to by remembering? A reasonable answer seems to be: facets of four-dimensional objects. If this is right, also direct realism about perception might ultimately concern facets of four-dimensional objects. This conclusion is rather sympathetic with Bergson’s view, for which three-dimensional objects are nothing but abstractions isolated from a (four-dimensional) whole by abstract thought. In Time Regained, Proust explicitly connects direct realism about memory to a four-dimensional ontology. He suggests an account according to which « the mental effort of combining eye and memory » allows us to experience objects for what they really are, that is, « monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the contrary, prolonged immeasurably since simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through— between which so many days have ranged themselves—they stand like giants immersed in Time » (1913–1927: 1012). Here, Proust reveals himself to be an ontological realist about the past (that is, a four-dimensionalist), and an epistemological realist about memory (that is, a direct realist). He believes that the past exists independently of experience and thought (ontological realism), but also thinks that memory, as such, puts us in touch with the reality of the past (epistemological realism). In contemporary philosophy, epistemological realism—or direct realism—is primarily adopted in philosophy of perception (see Martin 2002). However, if we consider perception and memory as components of a unitary system of experience, then we have good reasons to follow Proust and extend epistemological realism also to memory, thereby making the temporal experience compliant with a four-dimensionalist ontology. 4

The Atemporal Self

From a four-dimensionalist perspective, all things are process-things. However, to argue that a chair is a four-dimensional entity of which we only perceive

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a three-dimensional facet is one thing, but to claim the same about ourselves is quite different. In particular, conceiving of the self as a process-thing leads to the following issues: if me-at-t1 (in the past) and me-at-t2 (in the present) are both facets of a four-dimensional self, then why, at t2, can I only be aware of my experience at t2 and not also of my experience at t1? In what sense does my experience at t1 still exist as a facet of my four-dimensional self? Can there be such a thing as an experience of mine which exists without being currently enjoyed by me? One way to address these questions consists in stating that, at t2, I cannot enjoy my experience at t1 because myself-at-t2 can only enjoy my experience at t2. That is to say that, at t2, me-at-t1 is out of my reach just as the hidden face of an object. And yet, this raises a new question: namely, does the experience of me-at-t1 still exist as an experience? We are going to consider three ways to answer this new question. The first refers to Bergson’s philosophy, the second to Berkeley’s, and the third to Proust’s. At the ontological level, the first, Bergson-inspired strategy combines fourdimensionalism with the A-theory and the growing-block theory or the moving spotlight theory. In other words, we are in a four-dimensional world in which time actually flows. What results is a growing (or moving) self that has experience only in the present moment (the temporal point where the block grows or the spotlight moves). This seems rather close to the view endorsed by Bergson. From this perspective, we can keep thinking of the self as a four-­ dimensional entity, but we are forced to ascribe to its present facet (me-at-t2) a feature that its past facets (me-at-t1) currently lack, namely conscious experience. As Brad Skow (2009, §4) put it, « Of all the experiences I will ever have, some of them are special. Those are the ones that I am having NOW. All those others are ghostly and insubstantial ». The second, Berkeley-inspired strategy, instead, combines four-dimensionalism with the B-theory. We are therefore in a four-dimensional world in which the passing of time is only an appearance. What results is a series of “momentary selves” such that « you are only a system of floating ideas, without any substance to support them », as Berkeley wrote in his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. The unitary enduring self is nothing but an appearance, just as the passage of time. From this perspective, both me-at-t2 (in the past) and me-at-t1 (in the present) exist in the same way, namely as (stage-bounded) floating ideas or momentary selves. The unitary self and its sense of presentness are just an illusory effect common to all these floating ideas. In his paper Self, Mind and Body, Peter Strawson summarized this view— which nevertheless he does not endorse—in the following terms: « Wherever

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you say there’s one continuing soul-substance, I say there’s a whole series of them each of which transmits its states and the consciousness of them, to its successor, as motion might be transmitted from one to another of a whole ­series of elastic balls » (1974: 192). In his book Selves (2009), Galen Strawson— Peter’s son—endorses and develops such an insight, building up a fully-fledged theory of personal identity according to which the unitary self is nothing but a series of short-living selves. Contemporary philosophers who embrace a similar conception of the self also include Daniel Dennett (1991) and Laurie Paul (2003). The third, Proust-inspired strategy also combines four-dimensionalism and the B-theory, but without seeing the self as nothing but a system of floating ideas or short-living selves. According to this strategy, the reality of the self is not reduced to a mere series of momentary selves; the self rather exists as a whole made up of momentary selves, which are its temporal parts. This is Proust’s theory of an « atemporal self », which lies outside of time and can have several experiences at different times (me-at-t1, me-at-t2…) all at once. This Proustian conception of the self has been criticized by Jonathan Dancy in his paper New Truths in Proust? (1995) and by Gregory Currie in Can There Be a Literary Philosophy of Time? (2004). Both Dancy and Currie argue that there is no way to make sense of this notion of an atemporal self. In what follows, we shall defend Proust from Dancy’s and Currie’s criticism by connecting his ­notion of an atemporal self to his four-dimensionalist ontology. The idea is that the momentary self is a facet of the atemporal self, just as, from a four-dimensionalist perspective, a three-dimensional concrete object is a facet of a four-dimensional concrete object. In Velleman’s terms, « I would think of myself as filling time rather than passing through it or having it pass me by—as existing in time the way a rooted plant exists in space, growing extensions to occupy it without moving in relation to it. Having shed the illusion of an enduring self, I would have lost any sense of time as passing at all » (2006: 14). From this perspective, « atemporal self » does not means a self absolutely outside time, unlike what Paul Ricoeur (1984) argues in his interpretation of In Search of Lost Time. Rather « atemporal self » means a self outside the passage of time. The atemporal self is outside time only in the sense that it extends in time instead of enduring in time. This is the core of Durán’s (1991) criticism of Ricoeur’s interpretation. Drawing on some insights from Gerard Genette’s essay Proust palimpseste (1966), Durán states that Ricoeur’s distinction between the extra-temporal and the recapture of lost time is not only needless, it is invalid. As the text indicates, only the

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narrator’s extra-temporal being—his being outside of the vehicle—can recapture lost time. In effect, the ‘extra-temporal,’ the ‘timeless,’ the ‘eternal,’ ‘temps à l’état pur,’ the ‘recapture of lost time’ or ‘time regained’ are analogous. They all reside outside passing time in synchronic total time. (1991: 79) 5

In Search of Lost Time, or the Children’s Crusade

Even though all momentary “diachronic” selves exist as parts of an atemporal “syncronic” self, some of them can get close to the being of the atemporal self they make up. One can guess what it is like to be such a privileged atemporal self in special experiences like those described by Proust: And I began to discover the cause by comparing those varying happy impressions which had the common quality of being felt simultaneously at the actual moment and at a distance in time, because of which common quality the noise of the spoon upon the plate, the unevenness of the paving-stones, the taste of the madeleine, imposed the past upon the present and made me hesitate as to which time I was existing in. Of a truth, the being within me which sensed this impression, sensed what it had in common in former days and now, sensed its extra-temporal character, a being which only appeared when through the medium of the identity of present and past, it found itself in the only setting in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is, outside Time. That explained why my apprehensions on the subject of my death had ceased from the moment when I had unconsciously recognised the taste of the little madeleine because at that moment the being that I then had been was an extra-­ temporal being and in consequence indifferent to the vicissitudes of the ­future. (1913–1927: 904, our emphasis) In the passages we have italicized, Proust seems to embrace not only four-­ dimensionalism but also the B-theory and eternalism. In fact, like the past and the present, the future also falls under the jurisdiction of the atemporal self. In particular, « apprehensions on the subject of my death had ceased » because the atemporal self was already dead, and always had been: its death is nothing but the limit of its time scope, just as its birth. In this passage of Time Regained, Proust goes on to talk about the relationship between atemporal self and the momentary selves that make it up:

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That being had never come to me, had never manifested itself except when I was inactive and in a sphere beyond the enjoyment of the moment, that was my prevailing condition every time that analogical miracle had enabled me to escape from the present. Only that being had the power of enabling me to recapture former days, Time Lost, in the face of which all the efforts of my memory and of my intelligence came to nought. (1913–1927: 904, our emphasis) Here, the atemporal self, « that being », looks like an omniscient alien visitor that can appear to the temporary selves and reveal their very essence to them. This allows us to draw, in conclusion, a comparison between In Search of Lost Time and another masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, namely Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade. An extra-temporal being manifests itself to the Narrator of In Search of Lost Time just as the Tralfamadorians, the alien creatures who know the truth about the nature of time, appear to Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five. Like Proust’s atemporal self, « The Tralfamadorians can look at the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them » (Vonnegut 1969: 20). Other significant analogies can be drawn in this respect. For instance, as in Time Regained the Narrator sees Princesse de Guermantes’s guests old and worn out, but can also glimpse their lively and sparkling past, so in Slaughterhouse-Five, « When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments » (Ibidem). And as the Narrator sees Princesse de Guermantes’s guests « like giants immersed in time », so « Tralfamadorians don’t see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millepedes—‘with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other » (Ivi: 75). In his paper So It Goes, David Velleman (2006) treated Slaughterhouse-Five as an insightful literary reflection on the four-dimensionalist ontology and on what the latter involves for a conception of the self. In this paper, we have shown that In Search of Lost Time can be read in a similar way. On opposite sides of the Atlantic and of the Twentieth century, In Search of Lost Time and Slaughterhouse-Five exploit the power of literature in order to unfold the apparent passage of time into an eternal four-dimensional manifold. In this way, they shed some light on what it means to exist as a momentary part of an ­atemporal being.

References Bergson, H. 1896, Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit, Paris, Félix Alcan. Broad, Ch. D. 1923, Scientific Thought, New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co. Cameron, R.P. 2015, The Moving Spotlight: An Essay on Time and Ontology, Oxford, ­Oxford University Press. Currie, G. 2004, Can There Be a Literary Philosophy of Time?, in Arts & Minds, Oxford, Clarendon, 84–104. Dancy, J. 1995, New Truths in Proust?, “The Modern Language Review”, 90, 1: 18–28. Deleuze, G. 1964, Proust et les signes, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. Dennett, D. 1991, The Reality of Selves, in Consciousness Explained, Boston, Little, Brown and Company. Durán, R. 1991, Fourth-Dimensional Time and Proust’s “A la recherche du temps perdu”, “South Atlantic Review”, 56, 2: 73–90. Genette, G. 1966, Proust palimpseste, in Figures I, Paris, Seuil, 39–67. Husserl, E. 1928, Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins; English translation: On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. James, W. 1890, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols., New York, Henry Holt; repr. as a single volume, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 1983. Kriegel, U. 2015, Experiencing the Present, “Analysis”, 75, 3: 407–413. Lago, E. 2005, La volontà di potenza e il passato. Nietzsche e Gentile, Milano, Bompiani. Mackie, J.L. 1977, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, London, Penguin. Martin, M. 2002, The Transparency of Experience, “Mind & Language”, 17, 4: 376–425. McTaggart, J.E. 1908, The Unreality of Time, “Mind”, 4, 1: 457–474. Mellor, D.H. 1998, Real Time II, London, Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1945, Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimard; English translation: Phenomenology of Perception, London and New York, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. Noë, A. 2006, Experience of the World in Time, “Analysis”, 66, 289: 26–32. Paul, L.A. 2013, Temporal Experience, in The Future of the Philosophy of Time, New York, Routledge, 109–132. Proust, M. 1913–1927, À la recherche du temps perdu, Paris, Grasset and Gallimard; English translation: In Search of Lost Time, Modern Library, New York, 1992. Quine, W. van O. 1987, Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Ricoeur, P. 1984, La configuration du temps dans le récit de fiction. Paris, Seuil. Vol. 2 of Temps et récit, 3 vols, 1983–85. Sider, Th. 2011, Writing the Book of the World, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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Skow, B. 2009, Relativity and the Moving Spotlight, “Journal of Philosophy”, 106, 12: 666–678. Snowdon, P. 1998, Strawson on the Concept of Perception, in The Philosophy of P.F. Strawson, London, Open Court. Strawson, G. 2009, Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Strawson, P.F. 1959, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, London, Methuen. Strawson, P.F. 1966, Self, Mind and Body, in “Common Factor”, 4; reprinted in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, London, Methuen, 186–195. Varzi, A. 2001, Parole, oggetti, eventi e altri argomenti di metafisica, Roma, Carocci. Velleman, J.D. 2006, So It Goes, “The Amherst Lecture in Philosophy”, 1(2006): 1–23. Vonnegut, K. Jr. 1969, Slaughterhouse Five; Or The Children’s Crusade, New York, Dell Publishing.

Index Aristotle 88 See also Aristotelianism 38, 48, 85 Art vii, 38–39, 41, 48, 55, 62–68, 71, 73, 75, 77–89 See also History of art 26 Atavism(es) 5, 18, 22, 39, 41–5, 48, 51, 57n Augustine 59, 61, 96 Balzac, Honoré de 38, 71 Band 3–4, 23, 27, 32, 41, 43, 48, 55 Baudelaire, Charles 9n, 38 Beauty 3n, 5–6, 35, 73, 78–79 Benjamin, Walter 72 Bergson, Henri 91, 96–98 Berkeley, George 108 Bonnet, Henri 13 Bonomi, Andrea 92 Brentano, Franz 96 Broad, Charlie Dunbar 94 Brun, Bernard 13, 15 Contini, Gianfranco 12, 15, 33, 77n Currie, Gregory 99 Dancy, Jonathan 99 Deleuze, Gilles 3n, 5n, 7–8, 14, 23–24, 26, 31, 33, 41, 57, 72, 87, 92 Dennett, Daniel 99 Durán, Richard 93, 99 Einstein, Albert 93 See also einsteinian 93 Escape 2, 8, 27–28, 32, 44, 69, 86n, 101 Fallois, Bernard de 12 Feuillerat, Albert 12, 15, 76–77n Freud, Sigmund 20 Genette, Gerard 14, 33–34 Gentile, Giovanni 91–92 Habit 2, 4–6, 17, 62, 66 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich vii, 77n See also hegelian vii, 86–87

Heidegger, Martin 89 See also heideggerian vii Hermeneutics vii 87–89 Homosexuality 6n, 7, 16, 19, 26–27, 31, 39, 48 Husserl, Edmund 96 Identity 8, 32, 35–41, 43–45, 47–48, 50, 56, 78n, 99–100 Intelligence 6, 11, 29, 38, 56–57, 66, 77, 79–86, 101 James, Henry 7 James, William 96 Jealousy 2, 5–6, 10, 44, 47–48, 87 Jewishness 5, 16, 20, 25–27, 30–31, 39, 42 Kant, Immanuel 96 Kriegel, Uriah 96 Lago, Emanuele 90–91 Mackie, John Leslie 94 Madeleine 67, 68n, 77–78, 82, 100 Mallarmé, Sthéphane 87 Martin, Michael 97 Maupassant, Guy de 88 Maurois, André 12 McTaggart, John Ellis 93 Mellor, David Hugh 93 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 96 Metamorphosis(es) 1, 4–6, 10, 8, 18, 21–22, 26, 36–37, 47, 49–50, 52, 54, 57, 73, 82 Mask(s) 1, 4–6, 19, 22, 27, 30, 36, 45, 48, 61, 81 Nicole, Eugène 19, 34 Nietzsche, Friedrich 91–92 Noë, Alva 95 Past 1, 6, 7n, 8n, 17, 25, 52, 54n, 55, 62–63, 65, 67–70, 72, 76, 78, 79n, 82, 84n, 85, 86, 88, 91–94, 96–98, 100–101 Paul, Laurie 99 Pierre-Quint, Léon 12 Platonism 25, 27, 39, 68, 79 See also Plato 68–69

106 Poe, Edgar Allan 38 Poetics 9, 15–16, 18, 31–33, 75–76, 83, 87–88 Quine, Willard van Orman 93 Ricoeur, Paul 99, 72, 73n Sand, George 16 Sider, Tom 93 Skow, Brad 98 Snowdon, Paul 97 Strawson, Galen 99 Strawson, Peter 95, 97–98

Index Time 1, 4, 6, 22, 37, 43, 47, 63, 66–67, 70–73, 78–79, 83, 85, 92–101 Truth vii, 4, 6–11, 17, 37–38, 47–48, 57, 59–63, 67–68, 73, 77–83, 87–89, 100 Valery, Paul 87 Varzi, Achille 93 Velleman, David 96, 101 Vonnegut, Kurt 101 Work of art 8, 16–17, 62, 89